Botox for Sweating:
Treatment Areas
- Botox remedy ample sweating by blocking the nerves that activate the sweat glands.
- Effects usually last for nearly four months.
Hyperhidrosis, also known as ample sweating, is a familiar clutter that affects near to 2.8% of the U.S. population,
according to figures published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
Hyperhidrosis is most often treated with prescription antiperspirants or anticholinergics, significant oral drugs designed to reduce sweating.
However, these therapies aren’t always impressive.
So Patients who don’t reply well to usual treatment options may find Botox is an impressible way of managing hyperhidrosis.
Botox is presently only approved to treat underarm sweating, which demand 50 units per side.
However, it’s customarily used off-label to reduce excessive sweating in other parts of the body as well.
For example, research published in Neurology found that Botox decreased palm sweat for six months in most patients,
while other studies have shown Botox can be very effective for reducing forehead sweat.
| Treatment area | Units required |
|---|---|
| Palms | 50 per hand |
| Underarms | 50 per side |
| Feet | 50 per foot |
| Groin | 50-100+ |
| Forehead | 40-50 |
So how does Botox for sweating work?
The neurotoxin Botox stops nerves from firing by blocking the uptake of acetylcholine, one of the neurotransmitters that tells muscles to contract, explains Heidi Waldorf, M.D., director of laser and cosmetic dermatology at The Mount Sinai Hospital. When injected in the face, it essentially freezes the nearby muscles, which smoothes wrinkles and prevents expression lines that could cause even more wrinkles to form. It’s the same mechanism at work when used to stop sweat, but it acts on glands instead of muscles. Botox intercepts the message telling the glands to secrete sweat, so they don’t.
Botox injections have been FDA approved to treat excessive sweating. In the skin, Botox selectively turns off the sweat glands resulting in a normal appearance without wetness. Treatment is performed during an outpatient clinic visit and no recuperative time or special care is needed afterward. The side effects are minimal and beneficial effects long-lasting (average 6-12 months). Extremely high patient satisfaction rates of up to 98 percent have been documented in various clinical studies.
The injections are performed with the smallest available needle and are only skin deep. Using an over-the-counter anesthetic (4 or 5 percent Recticare) cream, injections in the underarms are nearly pain-free. The palms have thicker skin that is more difficult to numb, leading to more discomfort with injection. After treatment of the hands, some patients report a temporary weakening of their grip, lasting an average of two to three weeks.
