How Does Ivermectin Treat Neuropathy and Nerve Damage?

Executive Summary

• One of the surprising uses of Ivermectin is for neuropathy and nerve damage.
• This article covers a study on how it works.

Article Summary

This article covers neuropathy, its frequency, and how Ivermectin promotes nerve regeneration.

Introduction

The ability of Ivermectin to promote nerve regeneration is one of the most surprising applications of Ivermectin.

What is the Interest Level in the Search Topic Ivermectin Neuropathy?

The search for Ivermectin Neuropathy is a commonly searched term related to Ivermectin.

After reviewing the available articles on the Internet, we found very little coverage of the effectiveness of Ivermectin for neuropathy, despite substantial research having been published in this area. In response, we created articles covering the efficacy of Ivermectin, including an examination of Ivermectin neuropathy.

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The Evidence on Ivermectin for Neuropathy

These quotes are from the article Ivermectin Promotes Peripheral Nerve Regeneration during Wound Healing.

Important Point #1: What is Neuropathy, and How Common Is It?

Approximately 20 million Americans sustain peripheral nerve damage resulting from medical disorders and/or trauma.

For example, neuropathy, a condition that occurs upon peripheral nerve damage or disruption, often produces pain and/or loss of sensation and movement, and can result from diabetes, certain autoimmune diseases, human immunodeficiency virus infection, and chemotherapy treatment.

Chemotherapy is one of the most common causes of neuropathy.

Important Point #2: How Common Is Surgery for Neuropathy?

3–10% of all traumatic injuries result in acute peripheral nerve damage requiring surgical intervention.

Fewer than half of traumatic injury patients who undergo surgical nerve repair regain good to excellent motor function and sensation.

This type of irreparable peripheral nerve damage can negatively affect a patient’s quality of life and may cause severe and permanent sensory and motor function defects that can result in complete paralysis or development of chronic neuropathic pain.

Important Point #3: How Does Ivermectin Work to Promote Nerve Regeneration

Although our in vitro results clearly demonstrated a role of ivermectin in promoting nerve regeneration through the transformation of dermal fibroblasts into a more glial-like phenotype, it was important to understand if these effects could also be seen in an in vivo model.

In this work, we provide a role for ivermectin in promoting peripheral nerve growth in mammals. We discovered that co-culturing hiNSCs with ivermectin-treated fibroblasts resulted in increased hiNSC proliferation and migration.

What We Can Learn Regarding Nerve Regeneration from the Axolotl

Scientists have been studying the Axolotl to understand its ability to regenerate parts of its body. This is explained in the following quote from the same paper. 

Given the various shortcomings of current treatment options, there is a critical need to identify novel targets and to develop new strategies to combat the issue of impaired nerve regeneration.

One approach is to examine mechanisms in lower organisms, in which peripheral nerve repair is much more robust and efficient. Certain species of salamander, such as the axolotl, can regenerate entire amputated limbs, including completely functional neural components with tactile sensation and motion.13 Many studies have focused on understanding what makes these amphibians retain such a high regenerative capacity into adulthood, whereas so many other vertebrate species do not.

Important Point #4: How Easy It Is and How Much Sense It Makes Sense to Use Ivermectin

Given that FDA-approved Ivermectin is already currently used to treat a variety of infestations, including scabies, lice, and onchocerciasis, its use could be further adapted for clinical applications in peripheral nerve repair.

This has been my point about using Ivermectin for many other ailments; it is already approved and is one of the safest drugs.

Important Point #5: How Does Ivermectin Fare for Wound Healing — Which is Connected to Its Role in Neural Regeneration?

Interestingly, we found that treatment of hDFs with ivermectin resulted in a significant dose-dependent decrease of extracellular glutamate concentration (Figure 3A), suggesting that ivermectin-treated fibroblasts might also be able to uptake extracellular glutamate released by neurons upon injury.  We next assayed for the presence of both neuronal and glial markers in the healed dermal tissue. This is especially important as impaired wound healing often produces scar tissue, in which nerves fail to regenerate properly, resulting in loss of sensation at the wound site. Upon sacrifice at D12, we excised and fixed the wound tissue, subjected tissue sections to immunostaining, and found significantly higher expression of secreted factor GDNF (Figure 6A), glial marker GFAP (Figure 6B), and peripheral nerve marker (PGP9.5) (Figure 6C) in those mice treated with ivermectin-loaded collagen gels as compared to vehicle-control collagen gels. These findings correspond to our in vitro data to suggest that ivermectin also promotes nerve growth by inducing the generation of glia-like cells in an in vivo model of wound healing.

Previous experiments performed in X. laevis tadpoles demonstrated a role for ivermectin in promoting increased nerve growth from ectopic eye tissue.¹⁷ Fluorescently labeled donor eye primordia or unlabeled host tadpoles were treated with or without ivermectin before ectopic engraftment on the host animal flank. Hyperinnervation of the engrafted eye was only seen in those tadpoles, in which the donor tadpole received ivermectin pretreatment (and not vice versa).¹⁷ These experiments revealed that ivermectin treatment of non-neuronal stromal tissue can be exploited to induce the expansion of neurons from the adjacent engrafted neuronal tissue.

Although the effects of ivermectin on neuronal and glial growth in vivo were quite striking, it is important to acknowledge that the drug’s effect on wound closure was not as profound. It is accepted that wound healing in healthy mice is particularly difficult to improve experimentally,36 and more specifically, the BALB/c wildtype mice used in this study are known to heal relatively quickly.

Conclusion

There are few studies on Ivermectin and neuropathy. It certainly makes sense to try Ivermectin for this purpose, mainly as there are no known alternative treatments, except for surgery — which only a tiny percentage of those with neuropathy use.

See our neuropathy Ivermecting calculator at the Ivermecting Dosage Guide.

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