Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) Discussion Board

Has anyone heard of thought about Journavx, the Non-Opioid Pain Medication just approved by the FDA? It's very expensive. Medicare should cover seeing that it eliminates Opioid question. It would have to work like a miracle to warrant the prices I saw.

It will not necessarily work for WED/RLS. It should be interesting for us to see if it does or doesn't, since that should tell us something about the cause of WED/RLS symptoms.

Studies showed that WED/RLS patients have less endogenous opioids in our brains than people without WED/RLS. If that lack is one of the primary causes of the WED/RLS sensations, then a medication like suzetrigine (Journavx) might not help it.

But if the peripheral nerves, or even the dorsal ganglia of the spinal cord, are involved in generating WED/RLS sensations, then maybe Journavx would help.

Or maybe I'm out to lunch but those are my initial thoughts.

I would agree that it isn't likely to help. The same researcher at NIH that identified the connection between iron deficiency and adenosine receptors being blocked when then blocks both dopamine and glutamate receptors took a look at the way that opioids seem to get around this problem. He found that opioids energize a separate set of natural opioid receptors that are intended to work with endorphins. Unless suzetrigine (Journavx) activates these opioid receptors, which seems unlikely since that sort of defeats the purpose of a non-opioid pain reliever, then it isn't likely to benefit most of us.

However, since some people experience pain as part of their RLS and some of us do not, maybe it with be useful for the painful group.

I would have to agree with your assessments. One article said "While Journavx did not outperform the opioid combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen (Vicodin), it provided effective pain relief without the associated risks of opioid use." I use hydrocodone acetaminophen at 2am and it buys me 2 or 3 more hours of sleep. I call it my silver bullet and only use it once or twice a week.

As one who suffers severe pain in my thighs I would like to try it to see if "Journavx's mechanism of action is by selectively blocking NaV1.8, a sodium channel on pain-sensing nerve cells (neurons), this inhibits pain signals going to the spinal cord and brain." I thought it might block the pain even though it may have little RLS impact. I miss the days when my only complaint was restless legs.