Saturday, February 9, 2008

Carbamazepine for Restless Legs Syndrome

Carbamazepine has had some bad press lately due to the association of Stevens Johnson Syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis with the HLA allele HLA B*1502.

But this pharmaceutical has many excellent uses. One of the lesser known is for restless legs syndrome.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6419958?dopt=Abstract

In this placebo controlled study, carbamazepine was more effective than placebo at p <0.03, which is pretty good data for a study of that era. Reading between the lines, the patients who responded best probably would have had low ferritin levels.

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