Antidepressant Cymbalta may help relieve chronic back pain

Often, doctors find that medications prescribed for one problem help with another one. This often leads to the "off-label" use of drugs, or prescribing medications for illnesses or problems that they haven’t been approved for.

Somewhere along the line, doctors and researchers found that the antidepressant, Cymbalta (duloxetine HCl) not only helped relieve depression, but it also helped relieve chronic back pain. As a result, studies are being done to see if that finding can be proven.

According to a study presented this week at the European Federation of Neurological Societies (EFNS) in Madrid, Spain, this result has been duplicated. Researchers followed 236 patients over 13 weeks and found that those patients who received Cymbalta felt their pain decrease by half, compared with only 19% in patients who didn’t receive Cymbalta. The researchers also found that the Cymbalta patients did better in physical functioning.

There were side effects, however, and more patients in the Cymbalta group quit the study than the patients in the control group. Some of the side effects were nausea, fatigue, diarrhea, dry mouth, excessive sweating, and constipation.

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Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, back pain, cymbalta, Duloxetine