14 DAY TRIAL // The botulinum toxin, more commonly known as Botox to medical experts in the field of cosmetic plastic surgery and their patients, could help address nerve pain, a team of scientists argue in a report in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
More precisely, the research team claims that, as shown by experiments they performed on laboratory mice, the botulinum toxin can alleviate pain resulting from physical injury done to nerves and from chemotherapy-induced nerve damage.
Documenting the effects of Botox on nerve pain
To assess the effects of the botulinum toxin on nerve pain, University of California, San Diego specialist Tony L. Yaksh and fellow researchers started by inducing this kind of pain in mice.
Of the rodents they experimented on, some had one of their spinal nerves chopped off to induce physical nerve injury. Others were given a chemotherapy drug that damaged several of their nerves.
Once the mice were in pain, the scientists attempted to address their symptoms by injecting a specific type of the botulinum toxin either into their affected limbs or straight into their spinal cord.
The animals responded well to this treatment in that the pain in their affected paws subsided and they reacted with more ease to being handled and touched by the research team, Science Daily informs.
Further, the treatment did not appear to alter the rodents' normal reflexes in their paws and the animals could still feel other types of pain, which indicates that the botulinum toxin had a localized effect.
Writing in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, the specialists say that the botulinum toxin shots reduced nerve pain in the mice used in this study for a couple of weeks before the effects began to wear off.
A potential treatment for nerve pain in humans
University of California, San Diego scientist Tony L. Yaksh and his team are the first to admit that further research is needed before the use of the botulinum toxin as a nerve pain reliever can be tested on human patients, be it only in clinical trials.
Still, this does not change the fact that the researchers are quite thrilled with the outcome of their study on mice and plan to move forward with further investigations into the perks of using Botox to address nerve pain.
“Further work focusing on transport and uptake of these and other BoNT [botulinum toxin] serotypes will likely provide important insights into the mechanisms whereby these toxins exert their effects upon nociceptive [pain] processing,” they said in a statement.