ORANGE : Doctor Using Poison to Treat Paralysis

A doctor at UCI Medical Center is using a drug made from one of nature’s most powerful poisons to treat paralysis of the vocal cords, writer’s cramp and other movement disorders.

Dr. Daniel Truong, director of the hospital’s new Parkinson and Movement Disorders Clinic, reported that his hospital was the first in Orange and Los Angeles counties to make the unusual treatment generally available.

An injection of botulinum toxin, which can cause botulism food poisoning and death, allows paralyzed vocal cords to move again and can avert surgery on the voice box, said Dr. Stanley van den Noort, chairman of UCI’s department of neurology. Van den Noort explained that when the vocal cords become stiff and too contracted, lending a strained character to a person’s voice, an injection of the toxin causes the muscles to relax.

“You could do this with Novocain,” van den Noort said, but the advantage of using botulinum toxin is that the effect of the injection is long-lasting, typically four months.

The same toxin can be used to relax “writer’s cramp,” in which the muscles of the hand are drawn up in partial paralysis. It also can be used for milder forms of a disease called movement disorders dystonia, in which muscles of the neck, arm or face become contracted, van den Noort said.

He noted that these injections have been performed for about five years in New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Houston and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He said that Truong, who recently arrived at UCI, learned the technique at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

The injections have to be done very carefully, in exactly the right place with a specially monitored dosage, or they could cause damage. “I’m not going to do it,” van den Noort said.

Van den Noort noted that movement disorders like these are actually “quite rare conditions,” affecting one or two people out of 100,000.

Truong is attending a conference in Florida and was unavailable for comment.