Investi-gation of the effi̇cacy of intra-articular botulinum toxin type-a application in the treatment of experi̇mentally induced osteoarthritis in rats

Objective: This study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of botulinum toxin type A in experimentally induced osteoarthritis. Material and Methods: The study was carried out on 30 male Sprague-Dawley rats. Osteoarthritis was induced by intra-articular injection of MIA at a dose of 3mg/rat. The efficacy of intra-articular 10 U BoNT-A and 20 U BoNT-A injections were evaluated by body weight monitoring, knee circumference measurement, leg posture scoring, X-ray, micro tomography and histopathological examination. Repeated measures analysis of variance, generalised linear model, analysis of variance, Kruskal-Wallis test, independent sample T test and Mann-Whitney U test were used for data analysis. Results: In our study, there was a significant decrease in body weight and a significant increase in lameness scoring after BoNT-A applications. There was no significant change in knee circumference measurements at the end of the study. No significant difference was found in X-ray scoring, but statistically significant changes were found in micro tomography evaluations. Conclusion: In this study, it was concluded that BoNT-A produced statistically significant but clinically insignificant changes in pain and bone parameters, and high doses of BoNT-A produced adverse effects.