Thursday, January 26, 2006
Gabapentin for sweating
Supportive Care in Cancer has e-published a short article about using gabapentin for sweating in cancer patients. It presents a case-series of 9 patients with advanced cancer and severe sweating (which they rated on a 0-10 numeric rating scale); all of the patients had "idiopathic" sweating ( i.e. none had neuroendocrine tumors or were receiving hormonal therapies etc.). All patients had a good response to a week of gabapentin (at least a halving of their sweating rating) with tolerable side effects. Doses ranged from 600-1800mg a day. All these patients were inpatients on a cancer ward presumably receiving other treatments and so, along with simple regression-to-the-mean, more study is needed to say to least. But this is promising, and adds to the slowly mounting evidence that gabapentin has efficacy for a variety of symptoms besides neuropathic pain.
