Botox is famous for its ability to smooth wrinkles when injected into the face, but Johns Hopkins researchers may have found another use that goes beyond the cosmetic procedure.
Researchers discovered that patients with a painful and debilitating nerve compression disorder called thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) reported a significant reduction in short-term pain after receiving a single, low-dose injection of Botox in a neck muscle.
The study suggests that Botox could be a minimially-invasive alternative to surgery to remove the first rib and sever one of the muscles in the neck—the syndrome’s treatment of last resort.
“There haven’t been many alternatives to the use of surgery to treat this syndrome,” says Paul J. Christo, M.D., M.B.A., an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “Botox seems to be an effective treatment that avoids surgery’s obvious drawbacks, such as its invasive nature and long recovery time.”
The effects of Botox in TOS patients begin to wear off in a few months, as they do when Botox is used to treat facial wrinkles. Dr. Christo says patients should be able to receive repeated injections of Botox into the muscle over time; however, some could develop antibodies to the compound with excessive use, which would mean the toxin would no longer block pain.
Even as more therapeutic uses for Botox are found, it remains a popular cosmetic procedure. Statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons show it was the number one minimally-invasive cosmetic procedure performed in 2009 in the United States and is one of the procedures Dr. Heffernan performs in his Seattle office.
Read the full release on the study at the Johns Hopkins Medicine website.
Tags: Botox
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Botox, In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
