Observations placeholder

Pilocarpine is a drug used to treat dry mouth and glaucoma. It is a parasympathomimetic alkaloid obtained from the leaves of tropical South American shrubs from the genus Pilocarpus. It is a non-selective muscarinic receptor agonist in the parasympathetic nervous system, which acts therapeutically at the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor M3 due to its topical application e.g., in glaucoma and xerostomia.

Adverse effects

Use of pilocarpine may result in a range of adverse effects, most of them related to its non-selective action as a muscarinic receptor agonist. Pilocarpine has been known to cause excessive salivation, sweating, bronchial mucus secretion, bronchospasm, bradycardia, vasodilation, and diarrhea. Eye drops can result in brow ache and chronic use in miosis.

Systemic injection of pilocarpine can compromise the blood brain barrier allowing pilocarpine to gain access to the brain which can lead to chronic epilepsy. Epilepsy induced by injected pilocarpine has been used to develop animal models in rodents in order to study human epilepsy.

"Scoline apnea" is a serious complication. In that condition, patient is unable to resume normal respiration after termination of general anesthesia.

On Jan, 29, 2016: 23 people reported to have side effects when taking Pilopine hs. Among them, 1 people (4.35%) has Hallucination.