Acyclovir efficacy for bell's palsy treatment

This study aims to analyze the results regarding prednisolone alone, and the combined use of acyclovir with prednisolone in the treatment modality of Bell's palsy.

In this prospective, randomized clinical study, which was held in a single tertiary hospital, we evaluated 63 patients with Bell's palsy. 30 patients were given prednisolone alone, and we gave 33 patients prednisolone and acyclovir combination. We evaluated facial nerve functions using the House-Brackmann facial nerve staging scale. We completed the follow-up of the patients with the controls performed at 1st, 3rd, 6th, and 12th weeks.

We determined improvement according to the House-Brackmann scale as 86.6 % in the acyclovir + prednisolone group and 90 % in the prednisolone group (Table 2), and there was no statistically significant difference between the results got from the treatment groups (p > 0.05). The sequelae were 23.3 % (n = 7) in the acyclovir + prednisolone group and 27.27 % (n = 9) in the prednisolone group, but this difference was not statistically significant (p > 0.05).

We observed that the combined use of acyclovir and steroids in Bell's palsy does not have the advantage over using steroids alone.