ID: 207032 Durability of Relief Following 60-day Percutaneous Medial Branch PNS Treatment for Chronic Low Back Pain

Abstract

For patients with chronic axial low back pain (LBP), there is often clinical evidence of central nervous system sensitization and finding a clear source of nociceptive input or damage to the somatosensory system can be challenging. Conventional therapies that mask the pain can fail to address centrally-mediated, underlying causes of pain. Sixty-day percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) applied to medial branch nerves offers a non-opioid, non-destructive, and non-surgical treatment designed to restore the balance of peripheral inputs to the central nervous system and reverse maladaptive changes in central pain processing, which can be applied earlier in the treatment continuum than permanently-implanted neurostimulation systems. The objective of this large multicenter clinical trial was to characterize the responses to medial branch PNS in a prospective multicenter case series study in patients recalcitrant to multiple non-surgical treatments. Additional goals of the clinical trial were to determine which low back pain patient phenotypes may be more or less likely to respond to PNS.