Contributor: Chris Holmes, MD

Educational Pearls:

• Antiemetics were used in ancient Rome to help with sea-sickness and included toxic substances such as wine and wormwood and white hellborn
• The first antihistamine used for nausea, dramamine, was introduced in 1947 for motion sickness
• After this chlorpromazine, prochlorperazine, and promethazine came about in the 1950s and 1960s
• Cannabis, colloquially referred to as weed, isolates like THC used in the 1970s to help with chemotherapy-induced
• After this in the 1980s, ondansetron and metoclopramide were introduced for more severe chemotherapy-induced nausea
• Lastly, NK-1 inhibitors were introduced to treat nausea

References

Sanger GJ, Andrews PLR. A History of Drug Discovery for Treatment of Nausea and Vomiting and the Implications for Future Research. Front Pharmacol. 2018;9:913. Published 2018 Sep 4. doi:10.3389/fphar.2018.00913

Summarized by John Spartz, MS4 | Edited by Erik Verzemnieks, MD

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