Commonly prescribed pain drug can increase your risk of dementia by up to 40%

How nerve-racking!

The anti-seizure drug gabapentin is used to treat epilepsy, nerve pain after shingles and restless legs syndrome by affecting chemical messengers in the brain and nerves.

Common side effects include dizziness, drowsiness, headaches and nausea. Now, a new study out of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland warns that gabapentin can significantly increase the risk of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in people taking it for chronic low back pain.

“Our findings indicate an association between gabapentin prescription and dementia or cognitive impairment within 10 years. Moreover, increased gabapentin prescription frequency correlated with dementia incidence,” the study authors wrote this week in the journal Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine.

Researchers pored over records of 26,400 patients who had been prescribed gabapentin for persistent low back pain between 2004 and 2024 and 26,400 patients who didn’t get a prescription.

After taking into account patient demographics, their medical history and their use of other painkillers, the researchers determined that those who had received six or more gabapentin prescriptions were 29% more likely to be diagnosed with dementia.

This same group was also 85% more likely to be diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment within 10 years of their back pain diagnosis.

Dementia tends to affect older adults, yet the risks of dementia more than doubled among 35- to 49-year-olds prescribed gabapentin.

Their risks of mild cognitive impairment more than tripled.

Similar effects were seen in patients 50 to 64 years old.

Frequency of use was an important factor, too.

People with 12 or more prescriptions were 40% more likely to develop dementia and 65% more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment than those prescribed gabapentin three to 11 times.

Gabapentin was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1993 to control partial seizures in epilepsy patients older than 12.

Unlike opioids, gabapentin was initially considered to have a low potential for abuse or dependence.

However, there’s growing concern about its misuse, particularly to enhance opioid highs.

With this new research, the study authors acknowledged that their work was observational, so they could not definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between gabapentin and dementia.

They also noted that they weren’t able to account for gabapentin dose or length of use in their records review.

Still, they said their “results support the need for close monitoring of adult patients prescribed gabapentin to assess for potential cognitive decline.”

Other medical experts cautioned against drawing overly strong conclusions from the findings.

“While authors used statistical methods to try and account for other risk factors, this type of study cannot prove that gabapentin was the cause of increased dementia risk,” Tara Spires-Jones, director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, told reporters.

“One very important factor that was not examined in this study is levels of physical activity,” she added. “People with chronic pain requiring gabapentin may have been less physically active, which is a known risk factor for developing dementia.”

Other known risk factors for dementia include traumatic brain injury, untreated hearing loss, depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and a history of smoking.

Experts recommend lowering dementia risk with a healthy diet, regular exercise and social activity and without cigarettes or excessive alcohol.