Metoclopramide is a medication used for stomach and esophageal problems. It is commonly used to treat and prevent nausea and vomiting, to help with emptying of the stomach in people with delayed stomach emptying, and to help with gastroesophageal reflux disease. It is also used to treat migraine headaches.Common side effects include: feeling tired, diarrhea, and feeling restless. More serious side effects include: movement disorder like tardive dyskinesia, a condition called neuroleptic malignant syndrome, and depression. It is thus rarely recommended that people take the medication for longer than twelve weeks. No evidence of harm has been found after being taken by many pregnant women. It belongs to the group of medications known as dopamine-receptor antagonists and works as a prokinetic.In 2012, metoclopramide was one of the top 100 most prescribed medications in the United States. It is available as a generic medication. It is on the World Health Organizations List of Essential Medicines. In 2017, it was the 253rd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than one million prescriptions. Medical uses
Nausea
Metoclopramide is commonly used to treat nausea and vomiting associated with conditions such as uremia, radiation sickness, cancer and the effects of chemotherapy, labor, infection, and emetogenic drugs. As a perioperative anti-emetic, the effective dose is usually 25 to 50 mg (compared to the usual 10 mg dose).
The litigation was complicated since there was a lack of clarity in jurisdiction between state laws, where product liability is determined, and federal law, which determines how drugs are labelled, as well as between generics companies, which had no control over labelling, and the originator company, which did. The litigation yielded at least two important cases. In Conte v. Wyeth in the California state courts, the claims of the plaintiff against the generic companies Pliva, Teva, and Purepac that had sold the drugs that the plaintiff actually took, and the claims against Wyeth, whose product the plaintiff never took, were all dismissed by the trial court, but the case was appealed, and in 2008 the appellate court upheld the dismissal of the cases against the generic companies, but reversed on Wyeth, allowing the case against Wyeth to proceed. This established an "innovator liability" or "pioneer liability" for pharmaceutical companies. The precedent was not widely followed in California nor in other states. Litigation over the same issues related to metoclopramide also reached the US Supreme Court in PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, in which the court held in 2011 that generic companies cannot be held liable for information, or the lack of information, on the originators label.