Mebendazole

Mebendazole is a deworming medicine used in people since the early 1970s and one of the two medicines given to hundreds of millions of children a year in school deworming programmes. It works largely because the body absorbs so little of it: most of each dose stays in the gut, where the worms are, which makes it gentle at deworming doses but limits it against worms living in tissue. This page reports what the labels, guidelines and research found, from the deworming reviews to the falling-efficacy and cancer research, each claim tied to a source listed at the bottom. Decisions about any medicine belong with a clinician.

Table of Contents

  1. What Mebendazole Is
  2. Discovery and History
  3. How It Acts — and Why People Are Mostly Spared
  4. Poor Absorption and Why It Matters
  5. Approved Uses in the United States
  6. The Evidence for Each Gut Worm
  7. Tissue Infections: Hydatid Cysts and Trichinellosis
  8. Mass Deworming and the World Health Organization
  9. What the Deworming Reviews Found
  10. Resistance and Falling-Efficacy Research
  11. Cancer Research (Summary)
  12. Safety Findings
  13. Pregnancy and Breastfeeding
  14. What Is Not Known
  15. Connections
  16. Key Research Papers
  17. Featured Videos

What Mebendazole Is

Mebendazole is an anthelmintic — a medicine against parasitic worms (helminths). It belongs to the benzimidazoles, a family of synthetic chemicals built around the same two-ring core. The United States label describes it as methyl 5-benzoylbenzimidazole-2-carbamate, a white to slightly yellow powder that is "less than 0.05% soluble in water". That near-insolubility matters, and it comes up again below.

In the United States it is sold as chewable tablets of two strengths: a 100 milligram tablet labelled for pinworm, whipworm, roundworm and the two common hookworms in people aged two and older, and a 500 milligram tablet labelled as a single dose for roundworm and whipworm from age one. Both labels give 1974 as the year of first United States approval. The World Health Organization (WHO) lists both chewable strengths on its Model List of Essential Medicines, the list of medicines it considers a basic health system needs.

Its relatives: human and veterinary

The benzimidazole family includes several medicines with very different histories. The United States National Institutes of Health liver-injury reference, LiverTox, lists those available in the United States with their approval years: thiabendazole (1967, since withdrawn), mebendazole (1974), albendazole (1996) and triclabendazole (2019) (Hoofnagle, LiverTox, Anthelmintic Agents). Albendazole is the closest human relative and the other drug used in mass deworming. Fenbendazole is a veterinary dewormer for animals that is not approved for people; it is the subject of its own page.

Discovery and History

Mebendazole entered the medical literature at the start of the 1970s. A 1971 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, titled "Mebendazole in enterobiasis", reported a radiochemical study and a pilot clinical study in 1,278 people with pinworm (Brugmans and colleagues, 1971). (Enterobiasis is the medical name for pinworm infection.) A 2021 trial report describes the drug as "introduced for human use in 1971" (Gallia and colleagues, 2021).

Reviews from the 1970s show how quickly it found a place. A 1977 review of worm medicines described mebendazole as "a newer drug" that was as effective as pyrantel pamoate against pinworm, and called it, given over three days, "the most effective available drug" for whipworm (Katz, 1977). By 1979, after five years of clinical experience, a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine described its broad range of activity and its safety as "unique features of this anthelmintic", considered it the drug of choice for whipworm, and noted "great promise" in two uses it was not approved for: capillariasis (a rare intestinal worm) and hydatid disease, the cysts caused by a dog tapeworm (Keystone and Murdoch, 1979).

The World Health Organization's essential-medicines database records that mebendazole was first added to the Model List in 1977 for the four common gut worms, and in 2021 for echinococcosis (hydatid disease).

How It Acts — and Why People Are Mostly Spared

Microtubules: the target

Every animal cell contains microtubules, hollow rods built from a protein called tubulin. They act as the cell's scaffolding and transport tracks, and during cell division they pull the chromosomes apart. The United States label states that mebendazole "interferes with cellular tubulin formation in the helminth and causes ultrastructural degenerative changes in its intestine." As a result, the label continues, the worm's glucose uptake and its digestive and reproductive functions are disrupted, "leading to immobilization, inhibition of egg production and death of the helminth."

The 1979 review put it the same way: mebendazole kills worms by blocking their uptake of glucose, their main fuel. It also reported that the drug kills the eggs of roundworm, hookworm and whipworm, not only the adult worms (Keystone and Murdoch, 1979).

Why people are mostly spared

Human cells also contain tubulin, and the 2021 review notes that benzimidazoles act on the microtubules of mammalian cells as well as those of parasites (Chai and colleagues, 2021). That is why cancer researchers became interested in them (see Cancer Research). At deworming doses, the main reason people are spared is where the drug goes. The label states that after an oral dose "the majority of the dose remains in the gastrointestinal tract where it exerts an anthelmintic effect locally."

The protection is not complete. The label reports that at doses "substantially higher than recommended or for prolonged periods of time" people have developed hair loss, liver inflammation, falls in infection-fighting white blood cells, and a kidney inflammation called glomerulonephritis. They are covered under Safety Findings.

Poor Absorption and Why It Matters

What the label reports

The current United States labels report:

Why so little reaches the blood

Two findings help explain it. The drug barely dissolves in water, as the label's chemistry section reports. And in a 1985 study, five volunteers took a tiny radioactive "tracer" dose by mouth and by vein; only 22% of the oral dose reached the circulation unchanged, and because the breakdown products suggested the gut had absorbed almost all of that small dose, the authors proposed that the liver destroys most of it on its first pass after absorption (Dawson and colleagues, 1985). That study used a tracer amount, far smaller than a treatment dose.

Gut worms versus tissue worms

For worms that live in the gut, low absorption is an advantage: the drug stays where it is needed. The 1979 review put the trade-off in one sentence: "The drug's poor absorption does not appear to affect clinical efficacy except, perhaps, in the treatment of systemic helminth infections" (Keystone and Murdoch, 1979). Systemic infections are those where the parasite lives in tissue.

LiverTox describes the same split for worm medicines in general: for gut infections, "a single dose of a poorly absorbed anthelmintic is usually effective", while systemic infections may need courses lasting months or years (Hoofnagle, LiverTox, Anthelmintic Agents). For mebendazole, reaching tissue means very large doses taken for a long time — which is exactly the situation in which the label's blood-count and liver warnings apply. A 2023 review of hydatid-cyst treatment noted that cancer research on mebendazole has driven work on new formulations "to improve bioavailability and possibly reduce inter-individual variability in in-vivo drug levels, which may help its activity against cystic echinococcosis" (Chiodini, 2023).

Approved Uses in the United States

100 milligram chewable tablet

The label lists gut infections with hookworm (Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus), roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), pinworm (Enterobius vermicularis) and whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), in adults and children aged two and older. The labelled schedule is one tablet once for pinworm, and one tablet morning and evening for three days for whipworm, roundworm and hookworm. The tablet "may be chewed, swallowed, or crushed and mixed with food", and the label states that if a patient is not cured three weeks after treatment, a second course is advised.

The label's table of results from clinical studies gives mean cure rates of 95% for pinworm, 68% for whipworm, 98% for roundworm and 96% for hookworm, with mean reductions in egg counts of 93% for whipworm and 99% for roundworm and hookworm. These figures are for the three-day course; single-dose results in the field, below, are lower for some worms.

500 milligram chewable tablet

The label lists roundworm and whipworm in people aged one and older, as one tablet taken once and chewed completely, or softened in a little water on a spoon for people who cannot chew. Its approval rests on a double-blind trial in 295 children aged 1 to 15 in Ethiopia and Rwanda (Silber and colleagues, 2017):

Both labels list only gut infections. Uses against worms in tissue, described below, are outside the United States labelling.

The Evidence for Each Gut Worm

Roundworm (Ascaris)

A 2020 Cochrane review — Cochrane is an international network that pools trial results — included 30 randomised trials with 6,442 people from 17 countries. Compared with placebo, a single dose of albendazole, mebendazole or ivermectin cured 93.0% against 16.1%. Single-dose albendazole and single-dose mebendazole performed alike (98.0% against 96.9%, high-certainty evidence), and egg counts fell 96% to 100% with every drug. Failures after single-dose mebendazole ranged from 0% to 22.2% across studies. No trial reported serious side effects. The review noted that 20 of the 30 trials were funded or co-funded by manufacturers, and concluded that "there is little to choose between drugs and regimens" (Conterno and colleagues, 2020). The site's sub-article Albendazole and Mebendazole for Roundworm covers this in more depth.

Whipworm (Trichuris)

Whipworm is the hardest of the common gut worms to clear with a single dose. A 2008 meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association found single-dose cure rates of 36% for mebendazole and 28% for albendazole, and called single-dose treatment of whipworm "unsatisfactory" (Keiser and Utzinger, 2008). A larger 2017 network meta-analysis — a method that compares several drugs at once across many trials — of 55 randomised trials found low efficacy for all four drugs it studied, with mebendazole showing the highest whipworm cure rate, 42.1%, and an egg reduction of 66.0% (Moser and colleagues, 2017).

Hookworm (Hookworm)

Here single-dose results in the field differ sharply from the label's three-day figure. The 2008 meta-analysis found a single-dose hookworm cure rate of 15% for mebendazole against 72% for albendazole (Keiser and Utzinger, 2008), and the 2017 network analysis found albendazole the most effective single dose against hookworm, with a cure rate of 79.5% (Moser and colleagues, 2017). Six standardised trials in school children in six countries found single-dose mebendazole cut hookworm egg counts by 79.6%, against 96.2% for albendazole in comparable trials (Levecke and colleagues, 2014).

Pinworm (Pinworm)

A 2025 review of pinworm lists mebendazole 100 milligrams, pyrantel pamoate and albendazole 400 milligrams as the drugs of choice, each given as a single dose and repeated after two weeks; it notes that mebendazole and albendazole kill both adult worms and eggs, whereas pyrantel kills only the adults. The review reports that recurrence is common because of reinfection, that treating all household members is widely discussed when infections keep returning, and that for pregnant women pyrantel "is preferred" to the two benzimidazoles (Leung and colleagues, 2025). The United States label itself gives one tablet once. The site's Pinworm Treatments page covers the details.

A worm it does not reliably treat

The World Health Organization's fact sheet on soil-transmitted worms states that Strongyloides stercoralis "is not sensitive to albendazole or mebendazole" and is therefore not affected by school deworming campaigns; the agency's strategy for that worm relies on ivermectin.

Tissue Infections: Hydatid Cysts and Trichinellosis

Hydatid disease (Echinococcus)

Hydatid disease, or echinococcosis, is caused by the larval stage of the dog tapeworm Echinococcus; in people it forms fluid-filled cysts, most often in the liver. A 2023 review states that medical treatment of the common cystic form "is with a benzimidazole, with the addition of praziquantel under some circumstances", and that there have been "no new drugs for almost 40 years" (Chiodini, 2023). The World Health Organization added mebendazole to its essential-medicines list for echinococcosis in 2021.

Trichinellosis (Trichinella)

Trichinellosis follows eating raw or undercooked meat, such as pork, that contains Trichinella larvae, which settle in muscle. A 2013 review of its nervous-system complications states that albendazole and mebendazole "are the anthelminthic of choice" and are given with corticosteroids to limit allergic reactions to dying larvae (Bruschi and colleagues, 2013). The site's Albendazole and Mebendazole for Trichinellosis page covers the treatment record.

Mass Deworming and the World Health Organization

The scale of the problem

The World Health Organization's fact sheet (last updated January 2023) estimates that about 1.5 billion people, 24% of the world's population, carry soil-transmitted worms — roundworm, whipworm and hookworm, spread through eggs in human faeces where sanitation is poor. Heavy infections are linked to anaemia, poor growth and, in pregnancy, low birth weight. A 2006 review in the Lancet noted that mebendazole and albendazole are used both to treat infections and for "large-scale prevention of morbidity" in children in endemic areas (Bethony and colleagues, 2006).

The 2017 guideline

The World Health Organization's 2017 guideline on preventive chemotherapy, the term it uses for treating whole groups without testing each person first, lists two single-dose options: albendazole 400 milligrams or mebendazole 500 milligrams. As written, it recommends:

The guideline's stated aim is to "reduce the worm burden". It reports that in safety trials involving more than 6,500 doses of the two drugs there were no severe side effects, and that side effects — in 6.3% of people given mebendazole — were "minor and transient", lasting under 48 hours.

How it is delivered

According to the fact sheet, both drugs are donated to national ministries of health through the World Health Organization for school-age children in all endemic countries, and can be given by non-medical staff such as teachers. In 2021 more than 500 million children were treated, 62% of those at risk, and the yearly health burden attributed to these worms fell by more than half between 2010 and 2019, the period when treatment programmes were scaled up. The site's Mass Deworming Programs and Mass Drug Administration and Control pages describe the programmes in more detail.

What the Deworming Reviews Found

That deworming drugs kill worms is not in dispute. Whether treating every child in an area on a schedule improves children's health and schooling is a separate question.

The Cochrane review, 2019

The 2019 update of the Cochrane review of public-health deworming included 51 trials: one mortality trial with over a million children, and 50 others with 84,336 children. Its findings on regular treatment, every three to six months (Taylor-Robinson and colleagues, 2019):

The authors concluded that such programmes "do not appear to improve height, haemoglobin, cognition, school performance, or mortality", and cautioned against relying only on the older studies, because that "ignores the recent studies that have not shown benefit." They reported that these conclusions had not changed since the 2015 edition.

A second review, 2017

A separate review and network meta-analysis covering more than 1.1 million children, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the World Health Organization, found that mass deworming for soil-transmitted worms led to "little to no improvement" in weight or height, and little to no difference in stunting, attention, school attendance or mortality (Welch and colleagues, 2017).

One mebendazole trial in young children

In a placebo-controlled trial of 614 children aged 6 to 59 months on Pemba Island, Zanzibar, mebendazole reduced roundworm and whipworm infections but not hookworm. It raised motor scores by 0.4 points and language scores by 0.3 points, differences that were not statistically significant — that is, too small to separate from chance (Stoltzfus and colleagues, 2001).

These null results concern routine treatment of whole populations. They do not test treating a person known to be infected, which is what the drug labels cover. The World Health Organization's guideline, whose stated aim is reducing worm burden, remains in place.

Resistance and Falling-Efficacy Research

Whether worms in people are becoming resistant to mebendazole is one of the open questions about mass deworming. The United States label states: "There is a potential for development of resistance to mebendazole," most likely through changes in the worm's beta-tubulin protein that weaken the drug's binding, "however, the clinical significance of this is not known."

The Pemba Island hookworm finding

Pemba Island in Zanzibar had school-based mebendazole treatment from 1994. A randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 914 children there found that a single 500 milligram dose cured 7.6% of hookworm infections and cut hookworm egg counts by 52.1%, against 22.4% and 82.4% in a study done before the periodic treatment began. Efficacy did not differ between children treated repeatedly and those never treated. The authors concluded that "the overall efficacy of mebendazole against hookworm infections after periodic chemotherapy is reduced" and that the efficacy of benzimidazoles in control programmes "should be monitored closely"; adding a second drug, levamisole, raised the cure rate to 26.1% (Albonico and colleagues, 2003).

Setting reference values

Because robust reference values for judging these drugs were lacking, a group of researchers measured single-dose mebendazole in 5,830 school children in Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Vietnam using one standard method. Egg counts fell by 97.6% for roundworm, 79.6% for hookworm and 63.1% for whipworm. The authors proposed minimum expected reductions of 95%, 70% and 50% for the three worms, and stated that lower results "may indicate the development of potential drug resistance" (Levecke and colleagues, 2014).

Trends over time

The 2017 network meta-analysis estimated how efficacy changed between 1995 and 2015. The drop it found to be statistically significant was for albendazole against whipworm, where egg reductions fell from 72.6% to 43.4% (Moser and colleagues, 2017); that finding is about albendazole, not mebendazole. A 2021 review states that there are "emerging issues of drug resistance" in hookworms and whipworm, and possibly roundworm (Chai and colleagues, 2021). A 2006 review noted "concerns about the sustainability of periodic deworming with benzimidazole anthelmintics and the emergence of resistance" (Bethony and colleagues, 2006).

Field trials measure how well a dose works, not the worms' genes, so a lower result does not by itself show genetic resistance. The label's statement that the clinical significance of resistance "is not known" still describes the published picture.

Cancer Research (Summary)

Mebendazole is not approved for any cancer, and no trial has shown that it lengthens survival from cancer. The research is summarised here by evidence tier; the full account, with every trial, is on the site's page Mebendazole, Fenbendazole and Albendazole in Cancer Research.

Cell and animal studies

Because it disrupts microtubules, mebendazole has been tested on cancer cells for more than twenty years. A 2021 review reports activity in cell culture and in animals against liver, lung, ovarian, prostate, colorectal, breast and head-and-neck cancers and melanoma (Chai and colleagues, 2021). A 2026 systematic review found consistent slowing of tumours and longer survival in animal models of several brain tumours, and reported that the drug's formulation mattered, with one crystal form showing better penetration of the blood-brain barrier, the lining that keeps many drugs out of the brain (Blum and colleagues, 2026). Those brain measurements come from animals.

Human trials

The human trials have been small. In brain tumours, adults and children have taken mebendazole at very high doses — up to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body weight a day in one adult trial. For a 70 kilogram adult that is 14,000 milligrams a day, 70 times the 200 milligrams a day of the label's three-day deworming course. The 2026 systematic review concluded that mebendazole "was generally tolerable at high oral doses in early-phase studies", but that "current clinical evidence does not demonstrate meaningful efficacy in brain tumour patients" (Blum and colleagues, 2026). The one randomised brain-tumour trial compared two mebendazole combinations and neither reached its pre-set survival target, as the cancer research page sets out with its sources.

In bowel cancer, one double-blind trial in Egypt randomised 40 people with metastatic colorectal cancer to standard chemotherapy plus either mebendazole 500 milligrams twice daily for 12 weeks or placebo. After 12 weeks, 65% of the mebendazole group had a tumour response against 10% of the placebo group, and median progression-free survival (time before the cancer grew) was 9.25 months against 3 months. The trial registration is listed as made retrospectively, and the site's cancer research page found no larger trial repeating the result (Hegazy and colleagues, 2022).

The retracted 2026 observational study

A 2026 paper reporting survey outcomes from cancer patients who bought capsules of ivermectin and mebendazole was retracted by its journal in October 2026, citing methodological and analytical problems. It is not used as evidence here; its history is told on the page The 2026 Ivermectin and Mebendazole Observational Study.

Safety Findings

At deworming doses

The United States labels pool 39 clinical trials in 6,276 people treated for gut worms, with varying doses and formulations. The side effects reported were loss of appetite, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, flatulence, nausea, vomiting and rash. The World Health Organization's guideline review of more than 6,500 doses of albendazole and mebendazole found no severe side effects; the commonest complaints were upper-abdominal pain or discomfort, headache, nausea and dizziness, and they lasted under 48 hours. The 2020 Cochrane roundworm review found no trial reporting complications or serious side effects (Conterno and colleagues, 2020).

The label's three warnings

The metronidazole warning has a documented origin in at least one outbreak. Among Filipino workers in Taiwan, a study of 46 people with these skin reactions and 92 matched controls found the odds of the reaction were 9.5 times higher (95% confidence interval 3.9 to 23.9) in workers who had used both metronidazole and mebendazole within the previous six weeks, rising with greater metronidazole exposure (Chen and colleagues, 2003).

Reports after marketing

The labels list reports, from formulations and doses other than the current tablets, of allergic reactions including anaphylaxis, dizziness, hepatitis and abnormal liver tests, glomerulonephritis, hives, swelling under the skin (angioedema) and hair loss, alongside the blood and skin reactions above.

Liver

LiverTox states that the benzimidazoles, including mebendazole and albendazole, "have been linked to rare instances of hepatocellular or mixed liver injury, but which can be severe and prolonged" (Hoofnagle, LiverTox, Anthelmintic Agents). In an adult brain-tumour trial at 200 milligrams per kilogram a day, four patients developed severe rises in the liver enzymes alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase after a month, which reversed when the dose was lowered or stopped (Gallia and colleagues, 2021). The Liver Function Tests page explains what those enzymes measure.

Laboratory findings on chromosomes

The label reports that mebendazole did not cause cancer in mice and rats given it daily for two years, and was not mutagenic in a standard bacterial test. It was, however, "aneugenic" in mammalian cells in the laboratory and in a mouse test — meaning it caused cells to end up with the wrong number of chromosomes, the expected result of disrupting the microtubules that separate chromosomes during division.

Pregnancy and Breastfeeding

Animal studies

The label reports that in pregnant rats mebendazole caused embryo deaths and malformations, mainly of the skeleton, at single oral doses as low as 10 milligrams per kilogram, about half the maximum human daily dose when adjusted for body size. Similar effects were seen in mice, but not in hamsters or rabbits.

Human studies

The label states that published studies in pregnant women, including registries and randomised trials, "have reported no association between mebendazole use and a potential risk of major birth defects or miscarriage", but that they "cannot definitely establish the absence of any mebendazole-associated risk" because of recall bias, confounding, small samples and, in some cases, exclusion of first-trimester exposure. It also notes that untreated worm infections in pregnancy are associated with maternal iron-deficiency anaemia, low birth weight, and maternal and newborn death.

The largest single study is from Sri Lanka, where mebendazole was routinely prescribed in the second trimester. Among 7,012 births, major birth defects occurred in 1.8% of babies whose mothers took mebendazole and 1.5% of those whose mothers took no worm medicine, a difference that was not statistically significant. Among 407 women who took it in the first trimester, contrary to medical advice, 2.5% of babies had major defects, also not a significant difference. Stillbirths and newborn deaths (1.9% against 3.3%) and very low birth weight (1.1% against 2.3%) were less common in the mebendazole group. The authors' interpretation still advised against first-trimester use (de Silva and colleagues, 1999).

A 2021 Cochrane review of six randomised trials in 7,873 pregnant women found that a single dose of a worm medicine in the second trimester "may reduce maternal anaemia" by about 15% (low-certainty evidence) and "probably make little or no difference" to low birth weight or birth weight; its effects on preterm birth and newborn deaths were uncertain (Salam and colleagues, 2021). The World Health Organization's guideline recommends treatment only after the first trimester, stating that "because of this uncertainty during the first trimester, deworming medicines are not prescribed during this period."

Breastfeeding

The label reports that case reports show a small amount of mebendazole passes into human milk, that there are no reports of effects on breastfed infants, and that reports on milk production are inconsistent.

What Is Not Known

Connections

Key Research Papers

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  2. Katz M. Anthelmintics. Drugs. 1977;13(2):124-36. PubMed PMID: 319991
  3. Keystone JS, Murdoch JK. Mebendazole. Annals of Internal Medicine. 1979;91(4):582-6. PubMed PMID: 484964
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  11. Levecke B, Montresor A, Albonico M, et al. Assessment of anthelmintic efficacy of mebendazole in school children in six countries where soil-transmitted helminths are endemic. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. 2014;8(10):e3204. PubMed PMID: 25299391
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  13. Leung AKC, Lam JM, Barankin B, et al. Pinworm (Enterobius Vermicularis) Infestation: An Updated Review. Current Pediatric Reviews. 2025;21(4):333-347. PubMed PMID: 38288810
  14. Chiodini PL. Medical management of cystic echinococcosis. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases. 2023;36(5):303-307. PubMed PMID: 37593991
  15. Bruschi F, Brunetti E, Pozio E. Neurotrichinellosis. Handbook of Clinical Neurology. 2013;114:243-9. PubMed PMID: 23829915
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  18. Welch VA, Ghogomu E, Hossain A, et al. Mass deworming to improve developmental health and wellbeing of children in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. The Lancet Global Health. 2017;5(1):e40-e50. PubMed PMID: 27955788
  19. Stoltzfus RJ, Kvalsvig JD, Chwaya HM, et al. Effects of iron supplementation and anthelmintic treatment on motor and language development of preschool children in Zanzibar: double blind, placebo controlled study. BMJ. 2001;323(7326):1389-93. PubMed PMID: 11744561
  20. Chen KT, Twu SJ, Chang HJ, et al. Outbreak of Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis associated with mebendazole and metronidazole use among Filipino laborers in Taiwan. American Journal of Public Health. 2003;93(3):489-92. PubMed PMID: 12604501
  21. de Silva NR, Sirisena JL, Gunasekera DP, et al. Effect of mebendazole therapy during pregnancy on birth outcome. Lancet. 1999;353(9159):1145-9. PubMed PMID: 10209979
  22. Salam RA, Das JK, Bhutta ZA. Effect of mass deworming with antihelminthics for soil-transmitted helminths during pregnancy. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2021;5(5):CD005547. PubMed PMID: 33998661
  23. Blum CB, McMenamin M, Khoo T, et al. From anthelmintic to neuro-oncology: A systematic review of mebendazole repurposing for brain tumour therapy. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. 2026 (online ahead of print). PubMed PMID: 42120351
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  25. Gallia GL, Holdhoff M, Brem H, et al. Mebendazole and temozolomide in patients with newly diagnosed high-grade gliomas: results of a phase 1 clinical trial. Neuro-Oncology Advances. 2021;3(1):vdaa154. PubMed PMID: 33506200

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. Mebendazole in soil-transmitted worm trials
  2. Mebendazole efficacy and resistance in hookworm
  3. Mebendazole cancer clinical trials

Other Sources

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