“I’m confident we will able to provide similar superior results for other patients with chronic back and leg pain who would be appropriate candidates for this technology”.
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The study has proven that the high-frequency spinal cord treatment is around two times more effective than the low-frequency stimulation which is traditionally used for acute leg and back pain. It can reduce the effectiveness in SCS, but patients who had picked high frequency treatment recorded none.
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. Low-frequency SCS delivers frequency of 40 to 60 Hz where as high-frequency SCS, which is also referred to as HF10, delivers at a pulse of 10, 000 Hz. Overall, 90 of them received high-frequency treatments, where 81 of them continued with more traditional methods.
A brand new study could spell incredible relief for chronic back pain and leg pain; and the discovery is quite simple.
One of the benefits of high-frequency SCS is that it shows no signs of inducing paresthesia, or a tingling sensation caused by the device.
The study conducted by Professor Leonardo Kapural from the School of Medicine at the Wake Forest University suggests spinal cord stimulations (SCS) should be performed at high frequencies instead of low frequencies because the former are much more effective for this affections. 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. In addition, the authors noted that those who received HF10 therapy did not experience paresthesias, which is often a result from traditional SCS.
In a study of 171 patients who suffered from chronic leg or back pain that already had an SCS device implanted in their skin, over 80 percent of both leg and back pain patients reported a significant reduction in symptoms after three months of high-frequency treatment. That is, the higher the energy the more effective it is at treating pain. 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.
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Only 44 percent of the ones who were treated with low frequency SCS felt at least a 50 percent improvement in their pain.
