Botulinum Toxin A for Painful Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA): Randomized, Controlled, Triple-blind Study

Detailed Summary

Primary Total Knee joint replacement surgery is highly successful surgery for relieving pain and improving function in patients with disabling arthritis. Unfortunately, like all biomedical devices, prosthesis failure is a complication of knee replacement surgery that leads to disabling pain, stiffness and loss of function. Approximately 1% of the knee replacements fail every year leading to a 20% failure rate over 20 years. The common causes of failure of prosthetic joint are infection, loosening, trauma or wear of the prosthesis. Currently, a revision surgery is the best option for long term pain relief (analgesics or other pain medications are options but are of limited benefit). Surgery may not be feasible in patients due to advancing age, other medical conditions and surgical/technical difficulties or patient's choice. In addition, the results from revision surgery are not as good as the initial knee joint surgery. Therefore, there is a great need for a novel, targeted therapy that provides an option to patients who are unfit, unable, or unwilling to undergo surgery. In the investigators' recent pilot study, a single injection of Botulinum toxin A (Botox) in painful natural knee, ankle and shoulder joints of patients with various types of arthritis led to significant and durable improvement in pain and function and was safe to use. The investigators propose this 6-month study to compare pain relief, improvement of function and safety of an injection of Botulinum toxin compared to placebo in patients with a painful prosthetic knee joint. Both patients and investigators will be blinded to the treatment assignment to a patient until the study is completed. The investigators will assess the amount and duration of pain relief, improvement in function and short term safety of Botulinum toxin using standard validated measures. Patients will be evaluated at baseline, 2 weeks, 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- and 6-months after a single injection of either placebo or BoNT/A in the hip or knee prosthesis. The six-month follow-up is to assess the duration of meaningful pain relief. If successful, this will offer a new treatment option for patients with a chronically painful knee prosthetic joint, provide more insight into the origin and cause of pain in prosthetic joints and direct future investigations in new directions.

Study Details

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