This risks debunking a well-established practice: applying ice to an injury could actually hinder healing, to the point of tripling its duration, warns work carried out by a team at McGill University.
While ice can relieve pain at the time of injury, it then appears to interfere with inflammation, which is a component of the normal healing process, said one of the members of the research team, graduate student Mélanie Di Maria.
“Inflammation is often seen as an enemy; it often has a bad reputation, and that’s not entirely wrong,” Di Maria said. But inflammation as such is the body’s defense mechanism. It’s there to fight bacteria, it’s there to help repair tissues. It’s really the alarm signal of the individual or the body.”
The researchers therefore believe that “inflammation immediately after injury is crucial and essential for a good recovery,” she added.
The new study isn’t the first to question the long-term benefits of common anti-inflammatory strategies.
Previous work had shown that certain drugs, such as acetylsalicylic acid (Aspirin), could also prolong pain, and animal research has indicated that applying ice can delay tissue repair.
The application of ice, said Di Maria, “it’s true that it helps the pain, that it helps the inflammation at the beginning.”
The problem, she continued, is that their preclinical work “demonstrated, and it was really surprising, that in the long term, it lengthens the duration of pain.”
“So even if you reduced the pain immediately after the injury, it extended the normal injury recovery time by two to three times,” said Di Maria, who is herself a varsity athlete in two sports.
The new study stems from work done in 2022, which found that back pain patients who were given anti-inflammatory drugs, such as Advil, then had a higher risk of developing chronic pain.
Chronic inflammation is associated with several health problems, Di Maria continued, “but if you block the initial inflammation with anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil, with corticosteroids or with ice, our study shows that you have a hard time recovering in the long term, even if you have relief in the short term.”
“The results of this study show that, as with steroidal and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, the use of cryotherapy should be re-evaluated in the management of acute inflammatory lesions,” the authors of the study summarize.
This work was done in mice, so we can’t conclude that the same thing would be observed in humans. However, it would be interesting to see what would happen if we waited a few days after the injury before applying ice, said Di Maria. A clinical study that she is leading could shed some light on this.
“We don’t have a lot of ways to treat pain,” she said in conclusion. And here, we just said that ice and Advil are not correct. We need more options. We know that acute pain predicts chronic pain, but we don’t want to create chronic pain with our methods of controlling pain. We don’t want to create more problems than we solve.”
The findings of this study were published in the journal Anesthesiology.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
