Inappropriate citations used to describe the pharmacology of botulinum toxin type A preparations in clinical use.

摘要

Sir,The recent European consensus published by Wissel et al. (1) is a well-documented report on the current use of botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A) in adult spasticity. However, the authors describe the pharmacology of BoNT-A preparations by citing two publications that must be interpreted with caution.Firstly, the paper of de Almeida & De Boulle (2) has been cited, which included preclinical and clinical data supposed to differentiate BoNT-A preparations with respect to their diffusion characteristics. Pickett et al. (3) have subsequently clarified several sources of confusion in this work, including the absence of a role for the neurotoxin-complex size in diffusion of product, inappropriate unit ratios of different products being compared, and inappropriate animal studies cited for comparing BoNT-A products.