Have you ever experienced lower back pain? 80% of the United States population will or has experienced lower back pain just from everyday, normal events. Generally, most back pain is acute, however, 20% of those original 80% have chronic back pain, or herniated disks. A herniated disk happens when the intervertebral disk is torn and the middle, jelly part (the nucleus pulposus) of the disk protrudes out. This protrusion causes the "pinched nerve" sensation and the pain flowing down into the legs which can be defined as chronic back pain.
Until recently, the only cure for chronic back pain, besides exercise and medication, was surgery. There, however, has been new discoveries of a minimal invasive treatment using CT imaging and needles which has proven successful. With the help of CT imaging, doctors are able to insert a needle into the patients back and pinpoint the area of the bulging disk. A probe will then be inserted through the needle and deliver pulsed radiofrequency energy to the affected area over a 10 minute period. The probe will send gentle electrical pulses to the bulging disk. This pulse will relax and reduce the inflammation of the nucleus pulposus which in turn will reduce the distance between the vertebrae and reduce the patient's pain.
This new discovery has seen a high success rate of reducing back pain. There were 80 test subjects in this procedure and 81% of the individuals needed only one 10 minute treatment to cure their chronic back pain, and 90% of the patients did not need to get surgery following this treatment to cure their chronic back pain.
Considering that 80% of our population experiences lower back pain at some point in their lives, this discovery of a noninvasive cure could potentially be huge. We could save a lot of money and time by using this nonsurgical treatment.
As someone that has had a herniated disc that was pinching a nerve and then subsequently had surgery to repair it, this procedure is very interesting to me. I can say first-hand that the pain from a herniated disc is debilitating. I remember having to wake up throughout the night in pain because I had to take 4 ibuprofen at a time in order for the pain to subside enough to go back to sleep. Granted, mine was fairly serious as one doctor recommended that I fuse my two discs together. I wound up getting the less invasive microdiscectomy and it was one of the best decisions that I think I have ever made in terms of quality of life. That being said, I have followed back injury treatments since then to see what other procedures are becoming available. From reading about this treatment, my understanding is that it is a fairly invasive procedure. The radio-frequency pulse that is sent is at a low energy, however it still is RF waves and so the field that is being created is around 52 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the waves break apart some of the organic bonds holding the disk together and effectively melting some of the disc in order to reduce the size of the disc. This reduction does decrease the intravertebral disc size and subsequently reduces the pressure placed on the nerve root. Most literature I have read is that the long term effects of this needs to be researched more. Another, more surgical procedure that is being done is a full disc replacement. In this situation, the surgeon will go in through the front of the body and replace the disc with a synthetic disc. The early returns on this procedure are great, however the synthetic disc only has a shelf life of 15-20 years and so it would need to be replaced if performed on a younger patient.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4341032/