Gabapentin (Neurontin)

None. The muscles are there to protect the ear from loud noise exposure. I will lose that so I have to be even more careful to loud noise over time. They won't help with short duration noise like gunshots etc. anyway and that is what is dangerous to our ears.

 

I was just prescribed this by my psych. The ototoxicity does worry me quite a bit, but I'm seeing successes too. I'm really on the fence of whether to take this.

 

So my dog just passed away and it had unused Gabapentin. Who thinks I should take it and see if it helps my hyperacusis pain? Hyperacusis is kicking my ass right now along with facial pain.

 

How long after you took the first pill did you notice the effects?

 

It was probably the benzo I took on Friday that did it and not the Gabapentin. I tried the same a week later, without the benzo, and it did nothing really.

Sorry for the misinterpretation on my part.

 

That’s disappointing. Well I stole my dead dog's Gabapentin, so I guess I’ll see what happens. A lot of other people said they did well on it for pain hyperacusis.

 

Where did you hear that?

 

If you look up “Gabapentin” in hyperacusis groups on Facebook and just the internet, you’ll see a lot of anecdotal evidence that Gabapentin was helpful to them. It doesn’t help everyone obviously but too many people have seen benefit for me to think it’s placebo.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence in the various groups of different meds that have helped people with hyperacusis. They’re mostly meds prescribed for nerve pain. I’ve done a lot of research on this in the groups.

 

So I took a 600mg pill and not much happened. I think it did have some positive impact on the facial pain but it could’ve been placebo.

Tomorrow I’m going to take 1200mg and see what happens.

Fortunately I haven’t had a spike as a result of the Gabapentin. I’m hoping that this can be the panacea but we’ll see.

 

Update: I took 1200 mgs today and noticed some pretty interesting side effects, they include: suicide idealization, drowsiness and strange feelings in my hands. I can see why they wean people up on this stuff. Too bad I’m an inpatient fuck.

That said, still no obvious ototoxic effects. In fact, I think it does help the ear pain but I’m still not sure yet if it actually helps the pain or if it’s just the drowsiness making feel that way. I think it might lower my tinnitus but my tinnitus is usually very low, so it’s hard to tell (my main issue is hyperacusis, my tinnitus is mostly a non factor).

In addition, I definitely see an anti anxiety effect of the drug. It’s not as strong as phenibut but it’s definitely there.

I plan to continue on with Gabapentin. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to up my dosage tomorrow or do 1200 mg a second day. I’ll decide tomorrow.

 

Also, in addition to the previously mentioned anecdotal evidence. I also found this from Hyperacusis Research:

https://hyperacusisresearch.org/an-md-summary-of-the-2016-aro-hyperacusis-symposium/

“many hyperacusis patients find GABA-increasers like gabapentin (Neurontin®) and pregabalin (Lyrica®) helpful.”

 

Thank you for reporting your experience.

Just be careful of duration. They say you can be hooked (according to people on Facebook groups) if taking it regularly for 14-21 days.

 

From this article:

"Next Allan described a fascinating experiment in mice, illustrating a potential approach to targeting one of the contributors to neuropathic pain: the loss of inhibitory signaling. In this approach the missing GABAergic neurons are replaced by transplanting embryonic GABAergic precursors into the spinal cord. Then, GABAergic nerve transplantation was tried in humans and they “took.” Back to mice, the transplanted neurons spread around the cord and integrated into its central nervous system. Further, the transplants were able to reduce induced pain of complex regional pain syndrome—suggesting a repair of the central nervous system."

WOW.

I have had severe tinnitus and hyperacusis for 30 months. After 2 weeks of GABA supplements (natural) I felt very good but had to quit because of side effects. Of course you can never be 100% sure it was because of GABA.
I'm recovering from a setback and want to try it again.

 

Day 3 update:

Still feeling the suicide idealization but I’m no longer drowsy. In fact I’m hyper af. I could run a marathon right now. I’m also super fucking horny, like I’ve busted a nut five times today, I usually do that many in a week, my libido and energy in general are sky high. The limited cognitive impairment is fine.

Now to the ear stuff. Still no obvious ototoxic effects. Thankfully. I think the Gabapentin might be helping. I really do. Like not dramatically. It’s not like I’m normal but I do think I’m tolerating some sounds better. Tinnitus is the same.

The anti anxiety effects are very prominent now. I’m very sociable and relaxed and just want to talk to people.

I’m debating if I want to continue at this dose tomorrow or titrate upward.

 

There is a lot of literature on Gabapentin. Actually the use of this drug is discussed by Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia, dealing with severe cases of hearing damage, brain damage, hyperacusis, and lots of combinations of hearing problems...

The conclusion I get from that book, and other articles I read, is that Gabapentin does not work for many people, and some people have an improvement or brief relief from symptoms, most of them just temporarily (symptoms reappear after a while)... so mixed results basically.

 

@Midas Would you mind sharing what those side effects were? I’ve thought about taking GABA supplements multiple times, but I’m kinda scared because I can be pretty sensitive to vitamins and medications.

 

What are the natural GABA supplements?

 

I just posted this in the Klonopin thread

The combination of these drugs does something neither does on its own. I'd experimented with gabapentin up to 900mg before going back on Klonopin, but when I reduce the GHabapentin back to 300mg the tinnitus gets more shrill and intolerable within some number of days.

I don't think any of this is an especially good idea, but neither is being suicidally miserable half the time.

There really aren't any that work; best bet is a balanced diet plus behavioral things shown in repeatable studies to increase GABA signaling and/or decrease the size of the amygdala (meditation, yoga, etc). You need to be eating pretty well so you have all your essential proteins and also vitamins and the various things you need to biosynthesize cofactors, but, ultimately, getting GABA into synapses is something your body needs to figure out on its own if you're not going for a heavy drug cocktail.

You can eat all the GABA you want; it will impact your GI system a bit, but very very little if any of it will make it into the brain. Getting substances which are rapidly metabolized or the wrong size/shape, to cross the blood brain barrier is a difficult problem; if not for this, all kinds of junk from your bloodstream would get into your break and do Bad Things.

 

@linearb this post really resonated with me. Why did you mention reducing the size of the amygdala? I developed hyperacusis a couple of months after my father committed suicide. The whole event left me very traumatized and I’ve since read that people with PTSD have enlarged amygdala. Do you think there’s a link? I’ve also read that amygdala, once enlarged, cannot shrink back to their previous size, but what you are saying suggests otherwise.

 

Yeah, I don't know where you read that -- the amygdala, like many brain regions, will change in size with brain function

Meditation and yoga practice are associated with smaller right amygdala volume: the Rotterdam study

Mindfulness meditation training alters stress-related amygdala resting state functional connectivity: a randomized controlled trial

Impact of short- and long-term mindfulness meditation training on amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli

Meditation-induced neuroplastic changes in amygdala activity during negative affective processing

There's plenty of hard data that this stuff works, and you'll be very hard pressed to find anyone who has put, say, 3-500 hours into a meditation or yoga practice with some decent instruction, who doesn't think it "does stuff" that they find beneficial. There's some obvious problems with that observation: it's incredibly difficult to rack up that amount of hours in general, especially if you're starting in a stressed-out state.

However, I have found that people who are completely dismissive of all this tend to be both completely out of touch with the large wealth of peer-reviewed data behind it, as well as basically inexperienced. Some people will attempt meditation with no formal teaching, make it 10-15 hours in and realize it's making them feel "worse" (which is pretty normal, since often we're suppressing a lot of things constantly and it's painful when they start to surface) -- and then decide "oh, this is dumb, this doesn't work". That same person might have a completely different experience, if they could bond with someone that can talk them through the rough spots. At some point usually there's some kind of light-goes-on moment, but, it can be elusive, and learning theses skills from a state of distress is very difficult.

There's a reason that cultures where these things are/were valued tended to try to instill them at birth, more or less -- and there's a reason I do (short) meditation 5x a week with my small child. Wiring that stuff in at a base level is incredible; as adults, we just have to blunder into it the best we can, and be patient because our brains are slower to change. They're still changing all the time, though, very slightly in response to every thought we have.

I'm better at writing about meditating than actually doing it, and I'd say I have some hundreds of hours of experience, but not thousands. I know we have a few other people around here with really extensive experience -- or, people who have come through here.

There's a stark difference in the way tinnitus and other serious problems are discussed on fairly hardcore meditation forums, vs on health forums, because the demographic of people on serious meditation forums mostly have hundreds or thousands of hours of experience just watching their mind, and people like that are inherently in a better situation to withstand some random bullshit condition their body decides to develop. That's also something that's been demonstrated clinically using imaging studies

 

Did you check your Vitamin D levels?

It is an important vitamin for hearing issues...

 

I was low on vitamin D so now take a supplement every day.

 

It has recently been published that a lack of vitamin D can be associated to a higher risk of getting COVID-19.

 

Yes; they were actually low at one point and I took supplemental D for quite a while (and still do, one and off, depending on sun exposure) -- but bringing my levels to normal didn't have any impact on my hearing

 

I was reading about COVID-19 and incidentally found a mention to lower vitamin D levels as an additional risk factor to getting COVID-19, and they mentioned the drug Hidroferol to fix it. Have you tried Hidroferol, or are using some other supplement?