Anyone familiar with discussions in skin care knows that hyaluronic acid is a much talked about component. It absorbs water readily and penetrates deep into the skin. This makes it an excellent moisturizer. The acid is also used as a filler in some cosmetic procedures as well to help even out skin from the inside out. It turns out that hyaluronic acid may have another genuine non-cosmetic medical use as well. Some doctors are using it as a form of treatment for neuropathic pain. OROGOLD looked into the early reports on this to see if there was anything new to learn from this development. To understand everything does mean we need to briefly discuss what both hyaluronic acid and neuropathic pain are though.

Hyaluronic Acid
This is actually the name for both the actual chemical hyaluronic acid and, depending on the manufacturer, its sibling compound of sodium hyaluronate. They each serve the same purpose in skin care thanks to their moisture absorbing properties and suspensions of either can support the skin. As a filler, they can help smooth out wrinkles more directly than their topical application in a compound normally would. This use is highly common and well studied in the beauty industry. The catch is that all of these uses are cosmetic. Hyaluronic acid has a variety of medical applications. It is believed to assist the body in repairing wounds and appears to have shown some application in reducing inflammation in the body as well.

Neuropathic Pain
Pain isn’t always an accurate word to describe the experience of neuropathic pain, but it is always some form of unpleasant sensation in the body. Hot and cold burning, tingling, and numbness are all ways that it gets experienced. This doesn’t make it any less real though. It can originate from many conditions, but it always the result of damage or disruption to the central nervous system. This means that neuropathic pain can turn up almost anywhere on the body and it makes treatment of the symptom highly difficult. Its root cause as a form of damage or inflammation is what makes using hyaluronic acid interesting as a potential treatment given what we’ve previously discussed.

Reduction of Pain
A study focused on using hyaluronic acid as an injectable agent in the areas identified as the source of the neuropathic pain itself. Patients treated in this way experienced a noticeable decrease in pain within a relatively short window of time, typically within a day. This reduction in pain lasted slightly over half a year in most cases. Given the typical difficulty in treating neuropathic pain, this actually makes it a potentially useful course of treatment given further study. It does require that further study though as there were only 15 patients in the study itself. A larger sample size is necessary to determine the actual efficacy of injected hyaluronic acid in this case. There is enough to be cautious optimistic for its future as a treatment though.

Sometimes nature provides interesting symmetries like a compound that helps you look better also being responsible for helping you feel better. OROGOLD can’t predict where the results of this study will go in the future, but if it turns up again we will try to discuss it. Until then, you can at least use topical hyaluronic acid products with the confidence to know that use has been thoroughly tested.