Pregabalin side effects

[wantokporo]

Over a year ago, pregabalin started making me nervous and waking me up after a successful couple of years. I went off of it and started up a couple of months ago. The reason I decided to try it again was that I was having a nervous reaction to a lot of drugs -- that normally don't cause that -- and I thought it was just my anxiety issues with life issues and medications, so I feel some better now and thought I would give it a shot. After a very good couple of months, the 100mg dose I have been taking (along with 4 mg morphine) is again making me nervous. My question is has anyone developed some kind of side effect after using pregabalin for a while and toughed it out to have the side effects go away? I know this can happen at the beginning, but this isn't the beginning.

[amrob123]

Not in my experience. Unfortunately certain side effects increased/ cropped up the longer i took it. People take pregabalin for Generalised Anxiety Disorder so it's obviously having a counter effect for you. It could be the combination of the two meds you're taking?

[SueJohnson]

Amrob is right. It is unlikely to go away.

You might want to try switching to gabapentin. Although they are basically the same drug except you need to divide the doses, and the side effects are basically the same, some people find that the side effects that bother them on one don't bother them on the other. Multiply the pregabalin amount by 6 to get the correct dose. If you need more than 600 mg take the extra 4 hours before bedtime as it is not as well absorbed above 600 mg. If you need more than 1200 mg, take the extra 6 hours before bedtime. If you take magnesium, even in a multivitamin, don't take it within 3 hours of the gabapentin as it reduces the absorption of the gabapentin. If you take calcium don't take it within 2 hours for the same reason.

[wantokporo in reply to SueJohnson]

That was my next step. Question: can I switch directly from pregabalin to horinzant? I did this experiment a year ago (pregabalin to gabapentin to horizant) without success but before giving up altogether, I will try it again. Even a few more weeks of sleep would be great. But I would like to try Horizant first as, after likely failing, I would switch to gabapentin, and after that fails it is easier to reduce more slowly. While you can find advice that says you can go cold turkey if you are only taking 600mg horizant, that didn't work for me.

[Sydney75 in reply to wantokporo]

Horizant comes in 300mg tablets, maybe then go every other day etc. Horizant worked well for my HWP RLS but not much with nerve pain. It did cause some swelling in legs and must be taken w food.

[SueJohnson in reply to Sydney75]

Going every other day is likely to result in mini withdrawals.

[Sydney75 in reply to SueJohnson]

When my husband had surgery and was on opiate based meds, the protocol was to reduce the dose first and then extend the time between and then skip a does. Although the meds were not time released like horizant.

[SueJohnson in reply to Sydney75]

Generally skipping opioid doses does result in mini withdrawals. He was lucky.

[SueJohnson]

I would think so.