Effects of Local Anesthetics on Viruses from a Neural Therapy Perspective

Abstract

Viral infections have become one of the major health\rproblems of today's world. Especially the current coronavirus disease2019 outbreak, causing systemic complications and mortality, has led\rto a serious pandemic worldwide. The disease has a wide clinical\rspectrum ranging from asymptomatic mild form to multiorgan failure\rand death. Although there is no treatment for coronavirus infection,\rsome medications are used to suppress the inflammation. For this reason, the anti-inflammatory treatments have drawn attention to itself.\rLocal anesthetics which are anti-inflammatory drugs have been effective in several steps on inflammatory cascade. In our daily practice,\rone of the treatment methods with local anesthetics is neural therapy\rwhich is special injection techniques (local, segmental, ganglion and\rinterference area injections) and are applied to certain parts of the\rbody for diagnosis, treat inflammatory diseases, pain and dysfunctions. With the local anesthetic usage, the autonomic nervous system\ris regulated via inhibition of abnormal stimuli transmitted by this\rsystem and controlling information pathways between cells. At the\rsame time, the antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects of local anesthetics have been shown in various studies. It is considered that local\ranesthetics have anti-inflammatory effects by regulation of synthesis and release of anti-inflammatory mediators and antiviral effects\rby releasing of free radicals from lysozyme and inhibiting of membrane ATP-ase. In this review, we aimed to discuss the effects of local\ranesthetics and neural therapy on viral infections in the light of the\rliterature and evaluate their possible beneficial effects on coronavirus infection.