Nitroglycerin patches may help ease tendon pain

Patches containing nitroglycerin may help patients with common injuries to tendons, a research review suggests. The study team focused on overuse tendon injuries in the shoulders, wrists, heels and knees that are often caused by sports or repetitive physical tasks and can lead to pain, swelling and limited mobility. Depending on its severity, the condition may be treated with physical therapy, corticosteroid injections to provide short-term pain relief or surgery to repair or replace damaged tendons.

The current study examined another treatment option, nitroglycerin patches placed on the skin, which can have fewer side effects than injections or surgery, said senior author Neal Millar of the University of Glasgow in Scotland. While topical nitroglycerin has been examined for tendon pain for more than two decades, research to date has offered a mixed picture of how well it works for this purpose, Millar said.

To get a better look at the effectiveness of this option, Millar and colleagues analyzed data combined from 10 smaller clinical trials that randomly assigned some patients with tendon pain to use nitroglycerin patches and others to an alternative treatment or to a placebo, or dummy, patch.

After six months of treatment, topical nitroglycerin provided more pain relief than a placebo, Millar’s team reports in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

“This matters for patients because all other current pharmacological and injection therapies have failed to produce convincing results to improve patient care,” Millar said by email.

(Reuters)