High-frequency spinal cord stimulation relieves chronic back, leg pain

SCS is an increasingly common therapy that delivers electric pulses to the spinal cord, through a small device implanted under the skin, for hard to treat chronic pain in the trunk and limbs.

“Chronic back and leg pain have long been considered hard to treat and current relief options such as opioids have limited effectiveness and commonly known side effects”, Kapural, a professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and clinical director at Carolinas Pain Institute at Brookstown, said in a news release.

High-frequency SCS, which is also called HF10, is not uncomfortable for the patient because there is no risk of parathesia, which is an abnormal, morbid sensation such as prickling or burning. It can reduce the effectiveness in SCS, but patients who had picked high frequency treatment recorded none.

Chicago – Chronic back and leg pain sufferers in search of better pain relief options may have a new choice. On the other hand, patients who received low-frequency CSC 44 percent with back pain and 56 percent with leg pain obtained a drop of 50 percent or more of pain. In recent tests, scientists found that high-frequency spinal cord stimulation had almost twice the effectiveness for the relief of chronic back pain and leg pain in patients than the more traditional low frequency stimulation. The scheme was carried out for a 3 month period where 85 percent of those suffering from back pain and 83 of those with leg pain treated with high-frequency CSC witnessed a 50 percent or more reduction in pain. While all the patients had a spinal cord stimulation implant, around 90 patients were given the high-frequency SCS treatment and the rest continued with the traditional low-frequency treatment.

More than 1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from chronic pain, with lower back pain being the most frequent condition affecting 23 to 26 percent of the population. Figures have shown that 55 percent patients had fewer back and legs problem due to the HF10 treatment, whereas the traditional methods have only led to a 32 percent improvement of patients’ condition. None of the patients in the HF10 therapy group experienced paresthesia. This is good because, not only does it make the process more pleasant for the patient, but patesthesia can also interfere with how well the treatment works at treating pain. This frequency has been labeled as being 200 times higher than the traditional frequencies involved in SCS.