Focus on neuropathic pain

Pain is an unpleasant somatic sensation and emotional experience that accompanies tissue damage in our body. Among many diseases, pain is often the main symptom, such as: cervical spondylosis, lumbar disc herniation, osteoarthrosis, headache, neuralgia, cancer pain, etc., which is also clinically known as painful diseases, the incidence of such diseases is high, but many patients do not receive effective diagnosis and treatment. In 2007, the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China added “Pain Medicine” to the “List of Medical Institutions”, which is mainly engaged in the diagnosis and minimally invasive treatment of chronic pain. Since 2004, the International Pain Society has designated the third week of October as the “Global Day Against Pain”, with a different theme each year. In recent years, in order to raise the importance of various pain diseases and strengthen the research and propaganda of various pain diseases, October to October of the following year is set as the “World Day Against Pain”, and October 13 of 2014 is this year’s “World Day Against Pain”. “The theme of World Analgesia Day is “Concern for Neuropathic Pain”. Pain is usually divided into two types, one is perceived pain, caused by direct harmful stimuli, is a key component of the body’s defense mechanism, related to tissue damage or inflammation, also known as inflammatory pain; the other is neuropathic pain, due to peripheral or central nervous system injury, related to the injury area outside the tactile and thermo-sensory response abnormalities, including a series of pain syndromes, such as complex regional pain syndrome syndrome, phantom limb pain, cancer pain, AIDS pain, trigeminal neuralgia, and postherpetic neuralgia. There are many treatments available for neuropathic pain, but the results are not always ideal, which is related to its complex pathogenesis. In addition to the most commonly used pharmacological treatments, advances in neurointerventional treatment provide better options for better relief of neuropathic pain. Neurointerventional therapy in pain medicine is different from neurointerventional therapy in radiology, which is the use of intravascular catheter manipulation techniques to perform singleton diagnosis or treatment of lesions involving the blood vessels of the human nervous system for the purposes of embolization, lysis, dilation and shaping, and anti-tumor, despite the support of a computerized, finely controlled digital subtraction angiography (DSA) system. Neurointerventional treatment in pain department is mainly for the treatment of pain-related diseases due to injury, chronic inflammatory stimulation or compression of the nervous system. It is a clinical technique that targets the direct treatment of the nervous system itself and surrounding lesions with the help of X-ray images such as DSA, CT, G-arm or C-arm guidance or supervision. It has the advantages of significantly relieving nerve-related irritants and adhesions, being less invasive, relatively precise in operation, precise in efficacy, less complications, and relatively high in safety, and is one of the main core techniques of the pain discipline.