Effect of Local Anesthetic Versus Botulinum Toxin-A Injections for Myofascial Pain Disorders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Myofascial pain is a chronic pain disorder characterized by the presence of painful localized regions of stiff muscle and/or myofascial trigger points. Intramuscular myofascial trigger point injections are considered first-line treatments for myofascial pain. Common injectates include local anesthetics and botulinum toxin-A (BTX-A). The objective of this systematic review was to compare the effectiveness of local anesthetics and BTX-A on pain intensity in patients with myofascial pain. METHODS: A comprehensive systematic search of 3 databases, EMBASE, CENTRAL, and Medline was conducted. The search was comprised of words to describe "myofascial pain" and "injections." We performed a meta-analysis comparing local anesthetic and BTX-A injections across these follow-up week periods: 0 (immediately following the injection), 1 to 2, 3 to 4, 5 to 6, 7 to 8, 9 to 10, 11 to 12, 16, 18, 24 weeks with local anesthetics and BTX-A as subgroups. We also performed subgroup analyses comparing the effectiveness of local anesthetic injections and BTX-A injections at various muscle locations and comparing the effectives of single versus multiple injection sessions. RESULTS: In total, 33 studies were included. A qualitative analysis suggested that local anesthetics and BTX-A were inconsistently effective at mitigating pain across all follow-up periods. The meta-analyses revealed that local anesthetic injections were more effective than BTX-A at mitigating pain intensity. Multiple injection sessions of local anesthetics were more beneficial than a single session. CONCLUSIONS: Additional studies are needed to determine sources of heterogeneity mediating the observed differences in effectiveness of local anesthetic and BTX-A injections among the studies. Additional replicative studies are also needed to delineate the relative efficacy and effectiveness of local anesthetic and BTX-A injection. The quantitative results of this study suggest that patients overall experience more pain relief with local anesthetic injections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".