Pain disruption therapy may treat back pain

Business Standard: According to a study, people with treatment-resistant Back pain may get significant and lasting relief with dorsal root ganglion (DRG) stimulation therapy, an innovative treatment that short-circuits pain.

Chronic pain - pain that lasts three months or more - occurs when nerves continue to send signals to the brain after the original source of the pain is gone. An alternative to spinal cord stimulation, DRG stimulation disrupts pain signals by specifically targeting the nerves responsible for the pain. This may avoid unnecessary stimulation of nerve fibers that come from non-painful areas, which may occur with spinal cord stimulation. It also helps to meet the need for non-drug pain treatments in select patients.

During the study at American Society of Anesthesiologists, people who had DRG stimulation reported significant improvement in pain even after a year. They had tried numerous therapies, from drugs to spinal cord stimulation to surgery, but got little to no lasting pain relief. For most, DRG stimulation really improved their quality of life.

In the study, researchers implanted DRG stimulation devices in 67 people with chronic back pain. Patients were followed for 3 to 18 months. Seventeen patients had the device for more than a year. The study found:

Before implantation of the DRG device, most participants described their pain as 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst pain imaginable. After follow-up, the median score fell to 5, a decrease of 33 percent, which the authors note is a clinically significant improvement. BS