Botulinum Toxin Services for Neurorehabiliation: Recommendations for Challenges and Opportunities during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the function of medical facilities and rehabilitation services worldwide, including toxin services delivering Botulinum toxin treatments for neuromuscular conditions such as spasticity, dystonia, and sialorrhea. The aim of this paper is to understand how toxin services have dealt with the situation and what strategies have been adopted to continue services. The recommendations are based on a virtual round table held with toxin services experts from different European countries who shared their experiences and discussed the best practices. The challenges for toxin services were reviewed based on the experts' experiences and on relevant literature from 2020 and 2021. A set of recommendations and best practices were compiled, focusing firstly on guidance for clinical practice, including assessing patients' health and risk status and the urgency of their treatment. Secondly, it was discussed how patients on botulinum toxin therapy can be cared for and supported during the pandemic, and how modern technology and tele-medicine platforms can be generally used to optimize effectiveness and safety of toxin treatments. The technological advances prompted by the COVID-19 crisis can result in better and more modern patient care in the future.

Anatomical locations of the motor endplates of sartorius muscle for botulinum toxin injections in treatment of muscle spasticity.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to detect the idyllic locations for botulinum neurotoxin injection by analyzing the intramuscular neural distributions of the sartorius muscles. METHODS: An altered Sihler's staining was conducted on sartorius muscles (15 specimens). The nerve entry points and intramuscular arborization areas were measured as a percentage of the total distance from the most prominent point of the anterior superior iliac spine (0%) to the medial femoral epicondyle (100%). RESULTS: Intramuscular neural distribution were densely detected at 20-40% and 60-80% for the sartorius muscles. The result suggests that the treatment of sartorius muscle spasticity requires botulinum neurotoxin injections in particular locations. CONCLUSIONS: These locations, corresponding to the locations of maximum arborization, are suggested as the most suggestive points for botulinum neurotoxin injection.

Re Facial aesthetic injections in clinical practice: Pretreatment and post-treatment consensus recommendations to minimise adverse outcome Region-specific changes in line with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite the recent publication in March 2020 of guidelines for facial injectable treatments, the speed of the COVID-19 pandemic and its safety implications necessitate changes to these guidelines The authors described what would constitute safest practice in the provision of facial injectable treatments and summarised these in table form. Adherence to a high standard of asepsis and infectious disease precautions remain a key patient safety requirement when performing facial aesthetic injections. A revision and update of these guideline summary tables follows. Changes made should enhance both patient and staff safety regarding COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2, a highly infective respiratory pathogen transmitted by respiratory droplets, respiratory/mucosal secretions and contaminated fomites. Some of the additions are COVID-19 specific and are likely to evolve and change, particularly should serological tests determining acquired immunity become available. Other additions represent further tightening of our infection control precautions.