Spinal Stimulation to Treat Low Back Pain

Overview

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) has been used for almost 30 years to treat many intractable back pain conditions. It has demonstrated efficacy in the co-called Failed Back Surgery Syndrome (FBSS) and a recent randomized controlled trial demonstrated significant superiority of SCS over conventional medical therapy to treat patients with FBSS. Another trial has demonstrated superiority of SCS over repeat surgery in the same patient population. However, the ability to reliably capture the low back with paresthesia coverage has remained challenging and elusive despite numerous strategies designed to overcome this limitation. Strategies that have been introduced but so far with limited success include transverse multiple lead stimulation, high frequency stimulation, peripheral field stimulation, and dorsal root ganglion (DRG) stimulation. To date, none of these strategies have been able to reliably overcome the long-term problems of paresthesia capture and pain relief of the low back. This proposal describes a new spinal stimulation technique designed to improve the likelihood of low back stimulation by targeting the nerve supply to the two most commonly affected pain producing structures in the back, the facet joints and the intervertebral disks. The technique has proven to be feasible in a cadaver model with ease of lead placement at the desired targets

Conditions