Safety of intrathecal route: focus to methylprednisolone acetate (Depo-Medrol) use

Clinical research progress on intrathecal glucocorticoids in the treatment of infections: A review

In some infectious diseases, pathogenic microorganisms can directly or indirectly cause significant inflammatory reactions in the central nervous system, leading to severe neurological dysfunction, such as suppurative meningitis, tuberculous meningitis, and febrile infections. related epilepsy syndrome, etc. In these diseases, adjuvant administration of glucocorticoids is necessary to inhibit the release of proinflammatory cytokines, and intrathecal administration can deliver the drug more directly to the target. In this article, the authors studied intrathecal glucocorticoids for the treatment of infectious inflammatory reactions in terms of pharmacological effects and mechanisms, pharmacokinetics, clinical application, and safety. The authors concluded that the article could help provide new treatment strategies for infectious diseases.

Microneedle-mediated delivery of Ziconotide-loaded liposomes fused with exosomes for analgesia

Ziconotide (ZIC) is an N-type calcium channel antagonist for treating severe chronic pain that is intolerable, or responds poorly to the administration of other drugs, such as intrathecal morphine and systemic analgesics. As it can only work in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, intrathecal injection is the only administration route for ZIC. In this study, borneol (BOR)-modified liposomes (LIPs) were fused with exosomes from mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and loaded with ZIC to prepare microneedles (MNs) to improve the efficiency of ZIC across the blood-brain barrier. To evaluate local analgesic effects of MNs, the sensitivity of behavioral pain to thermal and mechanical stimuli was tested in animal models of peripheral nerve injury, diabetes-induced neuropathy pain, chemotherapy-induced pain, and ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation-induced neurogenic inflammatory pain. BOR-modified LIPs loaded with ZIC were spherical or nearly spherical, with a particle size of about 95 nm and a Zeta potential of -7.8 mV. After fusion with MSC exosomes, the particle sizes of LIPs increased to 175 nm, and their Zeta potential increased to -3.8 mV. The nano-MNs constructed based on BOR-modified LIPs had good mechanical properties and could effectively penetrate the skin to release drugs. The results of analgesic experiments showed that ZIC had a significant analgesic effect in different pain models. In conclusion, the BOR-modified LIP membrane-fused exosome MNs constructed in this study for delivering ZIC provide a safe and effective administration for chronic pain treatment, as well as great potential for clinical application of ZIC.

Assessing the impact of adding bupivacaine on immediate and delayed post-procedure pain scores in interlaminar epidural steroid injections

OBJECTIVE

A local anesthetic is frequently administered as part of a lumbar epidural steroid injection (LESI); however, there is a rare potential for this to result in transient paralysis if administered incorrectly. The purpose of this retrospective study is to determine if the addition of bupivacaine significantly improves patient-reported pain scores.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This retrospective review includes patients undergoing LESI over an approximately 1 year time span. Pre-procedure, immediate post-procedure, and 1-week integer scaled pain scores were recorded. Ordinal regression was used to compare the distributions of the aggregated ordinal pain score categories between bupivacaine- and non-bupivacaine-injected patients.

RESULTS

Two hundred fifty-eight patients met the inclusion criteria (126F:132 M, mean age 64.7 years) with 164 receiving bupivacaine and steroids and 94 receiving steroids alone. The relative frequency distributions for pre-injection pain did not differ between the bupivacaine patients and the non-bupivacaine patients (p = 0.114). Similarly, the relative frequency distributions for immediate and 1-week post-procedure pain did not differ between the bupivacaine patients and the non-bupivacaine patients (p = 0.293 at immediate time point and p = 0.306 at 1-week time point). Odds ratios comparing pain severity change between the bupivacaine and non-bupivacaine patients also were not significantly different at either the immediate post-procedure (p = 0.769) or 1-week (p = 0.203) time points.

CONCLUSION

The lack of a significant downward shift in the bupivacaine patients' post-procedure pain scores compared to the non-bupivacaine patients' post-procedure pain scores raises doubts about bupivacaine's utility as a standard component of a lumbar epidural injection.

Post-herpetic Neuralgia: A Systematic Review of Current Interventional Pain Management Strategies

Background:

Post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN) is usually a constant or intermittent burning, stabbing, or sharp shooting pain with hyperalgesia or allodynia, persisting beyond the healing of herpetic skin lesions. This review was carried out in concordance to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We used PICOS (Population, Intervention, Control, and Outcome Study) design for inclusion of potential studies into this review. Online literature available in PubMed, Cochrane, and Embase was searched for studies from January 1995 till March 2020, which evaluated interventional treatments in PHN by an independent reviewer, using the relevant medical subject heading (MeSH) terms. We analyzed the following outcome parameters with regard to each intervention—pain status at predefined fixed intervals after the intervention, quality of sleep using any of the reported questionnaires, analgesic consumption, functional evaluation, and quality of life assessment after the intervention.

Conclusion:

Interventional pain management options provide effective and long-lasting pain relief to patients not responding to medical management. The choice of intervention will depend on the region involved, cost, and invasiveness. Simple procedures such as intercostal nerve blocks/neurolysis, stellate ganglion blocks, paravertebral neurolysis, epidural steroid injections, and dorsal root ganglion–radiofrequency ablation are effective interventions, and if they fail, spinal cord stimulators could be effective in the hands of experienced pain physicians.