Plantar fasciitis gets better treated with ultrasound-guided technique with steroids

The combination of an ultrasound-guided technique with steroid injection is 95 percent effective to relieve a common and painful foot problem, plantar fasciitis.

This finding was reported by a study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Luca M. Sconfienza, M.D., from Italy’s University of Genoa and lead author of the study, said that there is lack of a widely accepted therapy when first-line treatments fail to relieve the pain of plantar fasciitis.

From News-Medical.Net:

For this study, Dr. Sconfienza and colleagues used a new ultrasound-guided technique, along with steroid injection, on 44 patients with plantar fasciitis that was unresponsive to conservative treatments.

After injection of a small amount of anesthesia, the anesthetic needle is used to repeatedly puncture the site where the patient feels the pain. This technique is known as dry-needling. Dry-needling creates a small amount of local bleeding that helps to heal the fasciitis. Lastly, a steroid is injected around the fascia to eliminate the inflammation and pain. The technique is performed with ultrasound guidance to improve accuracy and to avoid injecting the steroids directly into the plantar fascia, which could result in rupture.

After the 15-minute procedure, symptoms disappeared for 42 of the study’s 44 patients (95 percent) within three weeks.

The most common cause of heel pain, plantar fasciitis, tends to affect approximately one million people on a yearly basis in the United States alone.

Tags: dry needling, plantar fasciitis, steroid, steroid injection

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