Lidocain injections are often regarded as a potential replacement for corticosteroid injections, as the latter have been demonstrated to weaken tendons in the long-term (> 6 months).
What are the long term effects of Lidocain injections to treat a tendinopathy?
I wonder whether, from a long-term perspective, Lidocain injections help treat the tendinopathy, or on the contrary, have some deleterious effects, as corticosteroid injections do. (or has no long term effect)
I am mostly interested in epicondylitis (epicondylopathy).
The {1} 2018 RCT only looked at short-term outcomes:
No differences in the short-term outcomes were found between lidocaine and corticosteroid injection in a small sample of people with tennis elbow with mean duration of 3.8 mos.
References:
- {1} Hsieh, Lin-Fen, Ying-Chen Kuo, Chia-Cheng Lee, Ya-Fang Liu, Yu-Chia Liu, and Vincent Huang. "Comparison between corticosteroid and lidocaine injection in the treatment of tennis elbow: a randomized, double-blinded, controlled trial." American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation 97, no. 2 (2018): 83-89. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28816704
