Local Injection of Methylcobalamin Combined with Lidocaine for Acute Herpetic Neuralgia

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

Multilevel mixed modeling and survival analysis were employed to examine treatment responses.

Who Took Part

The study group was 204 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

The authors recruited 204 patients (>50 years) with T5-10 dermatomal acute herpetic neuralgia with rash onset within 7 days.

Patients were divided into two groups based on the time of onset: immediate-early (IE, 1-3 days) and early stage (ES, 4-7 days) groups and then subdivided randomly into control (IE-Ctl, ES-Ctl) and treatment (IE-Tr, ES-Tr) groups.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Because people in this Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

A time span of 7 days appears in the methods.

Randomized controlled trial with longitudinal analysis.

Control groups received intramuscular methylcobalamin in addition to local lidocaine injection, while treatment groups received local methylcobalamin combined with lidocaine injection for 14 days.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Anesthetics, Local, Lidocaine, Longitudinal Studies, Neuralgia, Postherpetic and Vitamin B 12.

Author keywords: Acute Herpetic Neuralgia, Herpes Zoster, Methylcobalamin, Randomized Clinical Trial and Subcutaneous Injection.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) in 204 patients over 7 days.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) compound page, all human trials.