• Expert Rev Neurother · Nov 2001

    Antiepileptic drugs in the treatment of neuropathic pain.

    • N Attal.
    • Centre d'Evaluation et de Traitement de la douleur, Hôpital Ambroise Paré, 9 avenue Charles de Gaulle, 92 100 Boulogne, France. nadine.attal@apr.ap-hop-paris.fr
    • Expert Rev Neurother. 2001 Nov 1; 1 (2): 199-206.

    AbstractAntiepileptic drugs were initially designed to treat epileptic seizures, but are increasingly used in the treatment of neuropathic pain. Efficacy of the newer antiepileptic drugs has been confirmed in placebo-controlled studies for trigeminal neuralgia, postherpetic neuralgia, painful polyneuropathy and central poststroke pain. While standard antiepileptic drugs act as sodium channel blockers, the newer antiepileptics display additional mechanisms of action, including a potentiation of GABAergic inhibition, specific binding on a subtype of calcium channels, a reduced release of glutamate and a blockade of AMPA/kainate receptors. These mechanisms could account for their antiallodynic and antihyperalgesic effects demonstrated in animal models of neuropathic pain and also suggested for gabapentin and lamotrigine in humans. Additional studies are required to compare efficacy of newer versus standard antiepileptic drugs and to better define their place in comparison with other analgesics in the treatment of neuropathic pain.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…