![]() It's not clear, however, whether pain was causing these patients to have higher levels of depression."ĭr. "If you consider the patients who had formal psychiatric evaluations and look at their rates of comorbid psychiatric diseases, 64 percent had major depression and 35 percent had anxiety. "Patients with depression and anxiety were more likely to undergo removal of the device within a year of treatment than after a year of treatment," Dr. For most patients in the study, however, the system was removed after a longer period of time because of ineffectiveness, loss of stimulation, infection, or the migration of the stimulator electrodes that were placed over the spinal cord. The 15 patients who had their stimulators removed quickly, in a median time of 2 months, typically suffered an acute post-surgical complication, such as infection. ![]() Half of the patients were legally disabled, and the most common cause of their chronic pain was flat back syndrome, a complication that can occur following multiple spine surgeries. Pre-implantation trials to determine efficacy were performed on all patients treated at Mayfield. Of the 129 patients in the study, 72 had their devices implanted by Mayfield surgeons, and 57 had their devices implanted by other practitioners. The researchers also noted that a large subset of patients who experienced spinal cord stimulator failure also experienced high rates of major depression, anxiety, physical or sexual abuse, post- traumatic stress disorder, or drug and/or alcohol abuse.īy performing the study, the physicians aimed "to shed light on potential avenues to reduce morbidity and improve patient outcomes." Led by Mayfield neurosurgeons George Mandybur, MD, and Yair Gozal, MD, PhD, the retrospective study found that stimulator systems were removed because of certain surgical or device-associated complications, such as an infection, or because the system no longer provided relief. Researchers from Mayfield Brain & Spine explored the reasons why spinal cord stimulator systems were removed in 129 patients over a period of 9 years (2005-2013) and published their findings in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. Although spinal cord stimulation is a well-established treatment that has helped thousands of patients with chronic pain syndromes, it is not effective in all cases.
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