This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Patients prefer anesthetic cream to cold application before Botox injection
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
A topical anesthetic cream showed similar efficacy to local dry cold application for relieving pain associated with botulinum toxin type A injections, a study found.
Orhan Elibol, MD, of the Kocaeli University School of Medicine, Turkey, and colleagues compared EMLA cream (AstraZeneca) with local dry cold application for pain relief in 40 patients treated bilaterally with periocular Botox (botulinum toxin type A, Allergan) injections. Indications for the treatment included blepharospasm or reduction of wrinkle, according to the study.
Twelve patients received a cold application on one side before receiving the injection; the contralateral side served as a control. In 12 patients, EMLA cream was applied to one side and the fellow side served as the control. The remaining 16 patients had cold applied to one side and EMLA to the other, according to the study.
In the first group, investigators found that pain on the cold-treated side averaged 3 points vs. 5.83 points on the untreated side (P < .001). In the second group, pain averaged 3.25 points on the EMLA-treated side vs. 5.83 points on the untreated side (P < .001). In the third group, pain averaged 3.18 points on the EMLA-treated side and 3.12 points on the cold-treated side (P > .05), according to the study.
Nine of the 16 patients (56.2%) in the third group preferred EMLA over the cold therapy, the authors noted.
The study is published in the March/April issue of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.