‘Nerve zap’ pain treatment could cut need for opioids after surgeries
An emerging technology could zap your post-op pain away — little or no opioids needed.
The technique is called percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation. It involves inserting a small wire next to a nerve and using a stimulator to deliver a mild electrical current to the affected area, interrupting pain transmission.
A team led by Dr. Brian Ilfeld, of the University of California, San Diego, tested the device in patients who were having foot, ankle or knee operations, or major shoulder surgery.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Ilfeld said. “You numb up the skin and place the needle through that location … then you use an ultrasound machine to guide the needle towards the target nerve and about one centimeter away from it, you deploy the lead, which is inside the needle. So you essentially just withdraw the needle, which leaves the lead in place.”
Patients then have their procedure and wake up with the device ready to go.
“When they’re in the recovery room, we attach a stimulator, which is about the size of two half-dollars placed next to each other,” he said.
At home, participants used a battery-powered pulse generator to control the electrical stimulation.
Sixty-five volunteers were part of this pilot study, with 31 in the active device group and the rest receiving a dummy device.
All received opioid pain medication just in case. Two weeks later, the lead was removed during a post-operative check up. Patients were followed for up to four months.
The findings were published online recently in the journal Anesthesiology.
“We decreased opioid use dramatically, by 80%, and we decreased pain scores by about 60%,” Ilfeld said. “So it was far more potent than we had anticipated.”
The possibilities are promising, but the size of this initial study was too small to make definitive claims, Ilfeld said. A more extensive study is in the works to see if the nerve stimulation technique could be integrated in future surgery pain relief practices.