Ambulatory continuous peripheral nerve blocks to treat postamputation phantom limb pain: a multicenter, randomized, quadruple-masked, placebo-controlled clinical trial
One article on PainSci cites Ilfeld 2021: Pain is Weird
PainSci notes on Ilfeld 2021:
This study delivers strong new (ish) evidence that phantom pain is not all between the ears, but in fact the signal is coming from the stump: nociception from the ends of the severed nerves.
“A 6-day continuous peripheral nerve block reduces phantom limb pain as well as physical and emotional dysfunction for at least 1 month.”
This is both therapeutically important for these patients, and a conceptually fascinating insight into how pain works. Specifically, it undermines the popular notion that phantom pain is entirely a brain-generated thing. That's oversimplifying this a bit, but in fairness ten times more detail would still be oversimplifying it…
It’s not really new knowledge — we’ve known for quite a while that “the signal is coming from the stump” — but this experiment was particularly high quality, really locked it down.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Phantom limb pain is thought to be sustained by reentrant neural pathways, which provoke dysfunctional reorganization in the somatosensory cortex. We hypothesized that disrupting reentrant pathways with a 6-day-long continuous peripheral nerve block reduces phantom pain 4 weeks after treatment. We enrolled patients who had an upper- or lower-limb amputation and established phantom pain. Each was randomized to receive a 6-day perineural infusion of either ropivacaine or normal saline. The primary outcome was the average phantom pain severity as measured with a Numeric Rating Scale (0-10) at 4 weeks, after which an optional crossover treatment was offered within the following 0 to 12 weeks. Pretreatment pain scores were similar in both groups, with a median (interquartile range) of 5.0 (4.0, 7.0) for each. After 4 weeks, average phantom limb pain intensity was a mean (SD) of 3.0 (2.9) in patients given local anesthetic vs 4.5 (2.6) in those given placebo (difference [95% confidence interval] 1.3 [0.4, 2.2], P = 0.003). Patients given local anesthetic had improved global impression of change and less pain-induced physical and emotional dysfunction, but did not differ on depression scores. For subjects who received only the first infusion (no self-selected crossover), the median decrease in phantom limb pain at 6 months for treated subjects was 3.0 (0, 5.0) vs 1.5 (0, 5.0) for the placebo group; there seemed to be little residual benefit at 12 months. We conclude that a 6-day continuous peripheral nerve block reduces phantom limb pain as well as physical and emotional dysfunction for at least 1 month.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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