The active ingredients against anxiety, epilepsy and severe pain can lead to increased deaths, data from England shows. However, it is almost never due to the medication alone, but rather to a dangerous combination.
It sounds more like a horror story than a relevant piece of information: “This painkiller is responsible for thousands of deaths,” was the headline in a recent tabloid. More than 3,400 people are said to have died in Great Britain as a result of taking the two painkillers Pregabalin (trade name: Lyrica) and Gabapentin (Neurontin). Newspaper reports there contain shocking descriptions of several individual fates – of people who mostly died after overdosing on the drugs or taking a fatal drug cocktail that also contained one of the two substances in question.