Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a disease of the gastrointestinal tract, mainly the intestines that may occur in the people who have genetic potential with a contribution of environmental factors. There has been no definitive medical treatment and drugs usually help the symptoms just to relieve.
Local anesthetics are used to locally desensitize the tissues to allow surgical interventions. However, their mechanism of action is based on their potential to inhibit neuronal activity in the area. Since it is proposed that IBD may be a result of imbalance in the autonomic neurons of the colon, local anesthetics have the potential to reduce the inflammation at the site of the colon that are affected by IBD.
A research article to be published on May 28, 2010 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. In a recent experimental study, investigators from Uludag University School of Medicine, Bursa, Turkey investigated the possible therapeutic effects of local anesthetics on IBD. They topically applied levobupivacaine, which is a novel, long lasting local anesthetic with less systemic side effects onto the colonic mucosa of the rats that had had experimentally induced IBD.
The researchers used some scoring systems that evaluated the inflammation at the site of drug application. They compared the local anesthetics to saline solution. They found some improvement in the degree of macroscopic inflammation at the areas where local anesthetics were applied; however, those findings were not supported by microscopic findings. Nevertheless, researchers concluded that local anesthetics might have potential therapeutic effects on IBD based on their findings.
Reference: Duman U, Yilmazlar A, Ozturk E, Aker S, Sarandol E, Yilmazlar T. Anti-inflammatory efficiency of levobupivacaine in an experimental colitis model. World J Gastroenterol 2010; 16(20): 2537-2541
http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/full/v16/i20/2537.htm
Correspondence to: Aysun Yilmazlar, Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Reanimation, Uludag University School of Medicine, Gorukle, 16069 Bursa, Turkey. [email protected]
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World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG), a leading international journal in gastroenterology and hepatology, has established a reputation for publishing first class research on esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, liver cancer, viral hepatitis, colorectal cancer, and H pylori infection and provides a forum for both clinicians and scientists. WJG has been indexed and abstracted in Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch) and Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, Index Medicus, MEDLINE and PubMed, Chemical Abstracts, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, Abstracts Journals, Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and Hepatology, CAB Abstracts and Global Health. ISI JCR 2008 IF: 2.081. WJG is a weekly journal published by WJG Press. The publication dates are the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th day of every month. WJG is supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 30224801 and No. 30424812, and was founded with the name of China National Journal of New Gastroenterology on October 1, 1995, and renamed WJG on January 25, 1998.
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