This topic is becoming huge. I can recall lists from a decade ago that had just a few known drugs on them, but that has changed today.

This change is because of the widening of research into mitochondria and how damage to these energy cells in our bodies leads to disorders and disease. The autism community is heavily now into this, and has its own results and therefore its own lists of offending drugs.
Often the autism lists do not contain all of the same drugs the PN lists do. Yet.

I made this post a year ago, based on an article from Science News which explains mitochondria with pictures.
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...t=mitochondria

Please read this link first, so you will have a foundation for the rest of this topic.

This post will be growing all day today, as I work on it.

Basically the drugs that are the most obvious as culprits to damaging nerves and therefore causing PN to occur are DNA disrupters. Statins, chemo drugs, some antibiotics, are the most common. But a search on this topic today, found that psychiatric drugs also damage mitochondria.

This article claims that many drugs are capable of doing this damage:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18626887

The readers here can search this topic on their own, if interested. It is quite large, and growing by the day. Use keywords such as "medication induced mitochondrial damage" or "mitochondrial damage from drugs" .

When mitochondrial damage occurs those cells cannot function normally any longer. When nerve cells are affected, then pain, and odd sensations may be the result.

Later today I will put up some lists I found of drugs (not including all the suspected ones from the PubMed list above).
There are drugs with a long history of causing nerve damage, and those lists are more cemented in fact, not suspicion.

Some of the drugs will get their own posts in this thread, because information on them, is available now. Statins, and fluoroquinolone antibiotics will have their own posts.

The small list below came from Wrong Diagnosis.com which has changed its format/name and no longer provides lists of drugs as possible causes of PN.
Some of the drugs are not used much anymore:
Chlorpropamide (type II diabetes and out of favor)
Clofribrate (but the other fibrates are still used)
Glutethimide (no longer used for insomnia)
Chloramphenicol (not in US and only for rare infections)
phenylbutazone (previously for arthritis--currently contaminants from China in herbs)
Clioquinol (not in US as oral, previously called Vioform--depletes B12 severely causing death and blindness and major damage to spinal cord)

The fluroquinolones do not appear on this list, or the other statins. So it is incomplete in that respect. It also has amitriptyline on it because some older sites listed this drug as an axonal cause of PN. This may be due to dosing, and may be a carry over from the high dose antidepressant days. Amitriptyline is now used in low dose for most PNs still.

The amino acids are sometimes listed as possible aids, are most likely lysine and carnitine. I have a post about carnitine on the Supplement thread here on this forum.

This is an interesting link. It describes how mitochondria tests are done:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Ne...y/25020801.asp

(notice it does not say it tested ALL statins, so it remains unclear that only the 3 listed are culprits so far.) However, it does illustrate that "idiopathic" may mean "drug induced" or toxin induced....and we just don't have all the data yet on all the drugs which might be causative. I think all drugs should be suspect until proven otherwise. You may definitely need some drugs (like Coumadin) and some blood pressure drugs. But rotating them, or replacing them, may reveal a PN change and discussing this with your doctor might be helpful.

I have amended this thread further down with other lists I have subsequently found concerning drug damage in PN.
Post #17 here has some links that provide partial lists.
It is very difficult to find up to date information on this topic. There are posts scattered on this thread with new drugs that have reported PN as a side effect.

edit to add:
I found this link with a list of antibiotic drugs explaining their negative impact on nerves:
www.medlink.com/web_content/MLT002IE.asp
This link requires you to put in a keyword in the upper left, to see the
separate papers. For antibiotics put in fluoroquinolone in that
keyword box and the first paper is the antibiotic one.
That site has a strict copyright rule, so we cannot copy information from there to here.

edit to add-- here is a link explaining chemo and other drug induced damage and PN...
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology...hy/Cancer.html

edit to add: 6-12-13-- this comprehensive article on drug induced neuropathies... I haven't read it all yet...but will soon.
Here is the link:
http://www.neuropathy.org/site/DocSe...pdf?docID=1604 This article appears to be old, since newer drugs are not appearing on the lists.
(fluoroquinolones).