Kashyap Komal, Joshi Saurabh, Vig Saurabh, Singh Vishwajeet, Bhatnagar Sushma
Department of Onco-Anaesthesia and Palliative Medicine, Dr. B.R.A. Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital, All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
Department of Anesthesiology, BLK Super Speciality Hospital, New Delhi, India.
Indian J Palliat Care. 2017 Jan-Mar;23(1):18-23. doi: 10.4103/0973-1075.197948.
To study the effect of scrambler therapy on patients with chronic cancer pain.
This is a prospective, observational study conducted on patients with chronic pain due to malignancy which is not responding to oral analgesics. A total of twenty patients were included in the study (ten males, ten females) with a visual analog scale score of >4 on oral analgesics. Patients aged 18-70 years with a life expectancy of >3 months having bony, neuropathic, or mixed type of pain were included in the study. A total of 12 sessions of scrambler therapy were planned, ten sessions on consecutive days and one session each on two follow-up visits after 1 week each. Each session lasted for 40 min. Pain relief and quality of life according to the World Health Organization Quality of Life were recorded as primary outcome variables.
All patients had good pain relief and improvement in all four domains of quality of life. Pain scores decreased significantly ( < 0.01) after each session and at each follow-up. Patients showed significant improvement in physical, psychological, social, and environmental health ( < 0.01) after the therapy.
Scrambler therapy offers a promising role in the pain physician's armamentarium as an adjunct to pharmacological therapy for the treatment of chronic drug-resistant cancer pain; it may bring down analgesic drug requirements significantly and improve quality of life in cancer patients. Larger prospective, randomized multicenter studies are needed to validate the findings of the small pilot studies published in literature so far.
研究干扰电疗法对慢性癌痛患者的影响。
这是一项针对口服镇痛药无效的恶性肿瘤所致慢性疼痛患者进行的前瞻性观察性研究。共有20名患者纳入研究（10名男性，10名女性），口服镇痛药时视觉模拟量表评分>4分。纳入研究的患者年龄在18 - 70岁之间，预期寿命>3个月，有骨痛、神经病理性疼痛或混合性疼痛。计划进行总共12次干扰电疗法治疗，连续10天每天1次，在每次随访1周后各进行1次治疗。每次治疗持续40分钟。根据世界卫生组织生活质量量表记录疼痛缓解情况和生活质量作为主要结局变量。
所有患者疼痛均得到良好缓解，生活质量的所有四个领域均有改善。每次治疗后及每次随访时疼痛评分均显著降低（<0.01）。治疗后患者在身体、心理、社会和环境健康方面均有显著改善（<0.01）。
干扰电疗法作为药物治疗的辅助手段，在治疗慢性耐药癌痛方面，为疼痛科医生提供了一种有前景的治疗方法；它可能显著降低镇痛药需求，提高癌症患者的生活质量。需要开展更大规模的前瞻性、随机多中心研究来验证目前文献中发表的小型试点研究结果。
