United Brachial Plexus Network, Inc.

our local neuroligist suggested that we consider bo tox injections for the bicep. i haven't heard of this application of bo-tox has anyone used this and how did it work?

in a way I relate botox injections to serial casting....

with serial casting you immobilize the unaffected arm so that the affected arm needs to work more

in the child's arm there are a pair of muscles that work together in balance.... but with our kids usually one is somewhat ok and the other is paralyzed...so they inject botox into the stronger muscle to paralyze it temporarily so that the other one works harder

it's botulism buggies btw

for those of you who did it...is this the correct explanation? and if not, correct me so i can learn more about it


francine

Pretty much the theory Francine. However I beleive they don't use enough to actually paralyze the stronger muscle but rather just relax it. I see it alot in patients with laryngeal spasms at our facility and they seem to need it about once or twice a month so I don't think they are using a great deal of drugs on them at one time.

When Katie went for mod Dr. Arturo and Shenaq suggested we may have to use the injections on her triceps as she had no bicep going on at all. But they released the tricep head (?) during surgery instead and now she has a rather large bulging bicep--which overpowers the weak tricep. Darned if you do and darned if you don't.

I also have seen them use this is kids (at a much larger facility) that had spastic cp and I beleive strabismus (crossed eyes?) sorry not so sure, it has been a long time since I was there.

My daughter had the injections and they didn't help at all..they were suppose to relax her muscles so they could do some extensions....but it didn't work....
Jana

My therapists said that the botox injections were painful. Is that true? Just wondering.

Taylor had botox injections into her tricep muscle this last Thanksgiving. We did a ton of research and talked to alot of different Dr's. Dr. Nelson and Dr. Nath in Texas and our local Dr's all thought it would be worth a try for her. Her tricep muscle came back strong (the only one) after she was intially injured. So she uses it to compensate for a lot of movement she never got back. After ModQuad we were hoping to see more bicep and there was a little more but nothing significant. They thought a couple things may happen if we tried this. One that the Tricep would stop taking over when the bicep should and two also help train the brain to know that the bicep should be kicking in not the tricep. We were told there was a "discomfort" level with doing this. In actuality it can be very painful. We talked to the Dr's about how we could make this better. They gave us emla cream to put on an hour before the injections and then they gave her versed before the procedure when we were at the hospital. The emla worked great and she was in lala land from the versed. She doesn't remember the procedure at all and didn't cry once during the actual injections. We went prepared with toys and videos that she could watch. So we were very lucky and the procedure was trauma free. We also are seeing good results from the botox. It took a couple days and then all of a sudden she could bendat the elbow. My husband and I almost fell over the first time we saw her do it. Once they saw that we could get good results from this they up'd her therapy to PT 2 x a week, OT 2 x a week and aqua therapy 1 time a week. So she was busy. We also continued e-stim 3 times a day starting a week or so after the injections again. They really wanted to pump up the bicep while we could. The hardest part was seeign her lose the use of her tricep. It is coming back but at first I freaked out thinking that now that has been taken from her to. But she is doing good, we have more bicep than we did, the procedure went great for us and the tricep is now coming back as the botox wears off. They say it wears off anywhere from 3 - 6 months depending upon the child. Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any other questions. Hope this was helpful.