Affecting more than 51 million Americans, chronic pain is more common than other long-term conditions such as depression and diabetes.
While progress is being made in developing non-opioid therapeutics, much of the treatment is focused on pain management.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine, however, believe there’s a non-invasive treatment for chronic pain that can not just alleviate it short-term but potentially can make the relief permanent.
In a review of 381 randomized clinical trials, the team found that scrambler therapy – which delivers electrical stimulation via electrodes to areas surrounding the source of chronic pain – could offer significant relief in 80-90% of patients. And it may be more effective than transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), which similarly uses electrical stimulation via electrodes, but directs the currents at the pain nerves.
"Scrambler therapy is the most exciting development I have seen in years – it's effective, it's noninvasive, it reduces opioid use substantially and it can be permanent,” said lead author Dr. Thomas Smith, professor of oncology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Scrambler therapy aims to capture the nerve endings from damaged nerves, also the source of the pain, and replace the pain signals with ones from neighboring nerves, essentially ‘scrambling’ the information that reaches the brain.
Blocking this established signal transmission can undo the communication from damaged nerves to the brain that has led to the condition becoming chronic.
"If you can block the ascending pain impulses and enhance the inhibitory system, you can potentially reset the brain so it doesn't feel chronic pain nearly as badly," said Dr. Smith. "It's like pressing Control-Alt-Delete about a billion times.”
With three to 12 half-hour sessions, patients experienced “really substantial relief that can often be permanent," according Smith, also a physician who treats chronic pain.
The researchers hope for more studies into the benefits of scrambler therapy, which was approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration in 2009.
The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine