Local Administration of Methylcobalamin for Subacute Ophthalmic Herpetic Neuralgia: A Randomized, Phase III Clinical Trial

What Was Tested

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

The ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve is one of the most frequently involved sites of postherpetic neuralgia.

Multilevel mixed modeling was employed to examine treatment responses.

Who Took Part

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

One hundred and five patients with a pain score of 4 or greater were randomized to receive a combination of methylcobalamin and lidocaine via local injection (LM group, n = 35), intramuscular methylcobalamin and local lidocaine injection (IM group, n = 35), and oral methylcobalamin tablet and lidocaine local injection (OM group, n = 35) for 4 weeks.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

The methods mention a period of 4 weeks.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Cutaneous, Analgesics, Anesthetics, Local, Herpes Zoster Ophthalmicus, Lidocaine, Nerve Growth Factors and Neuralgia, Postherpetic.

The authors tagged it with the keywords herpetic neuralgia, methylcobalamin, neural repair strategy, neurotrophic agent, ophthalmic branch and trigeminal nerve.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) over 4 weeks.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2020 (Pain practice : the official journal of World Institute of Pain), a journal based in United States.

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