Cancer pain (neurosurgical management)

Abstract

The management of cancer pain represents a difficult diagnostic and therapeutic problem for the clinician. In a multidisciplinary approach to the management of cancer pain, neurosurgical methods are an essential part of the therapy. Frequently, patients with advanced cancer suffer from an increasing pain, requesting ever-higher dosage of narcotics, and finally seeming to respond only to high dosage of intravenous narcotics. Gradually, the opioids produce less satisfactory analgetics effects an more serious side manifestations. These patients can be considered for surgical management of pain. Historically, surgery for cancer pain began with destructive procedures (neurectomy, rhizotomy, sympathectomy), often referred to as ablative. In past two decades, with the help of the current knowledge of cancer pain mechanisms and some of the technological developments, such as microsurgical and stereotactic techniques, computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, the majority of ablative procedures have been replaced by new methods. Among them a few are selectively and minimally ablative (microsurgical spinothalamic cordotomy, dorsal root entry zone operation, limited midline myelotomy) and the others ones are neuroaugumentative operations (deep brain structures and spinal cord stimulation, drug-delivery systems).