In a first, patient in India treated with world’s smallest implantable spinal cord stimulator

Mumbai: India Medtronic has announced the first clinical procedure in India with the Intellis™ spinal cord stimulation (SCS) platform, the world’s smallest SCS device for the management of certain types of chronic intractable pain.

Dr. Paresh Doshi, director of neurosurgery at the Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre, Mumbai, successfully implanted the first Intellis device in a patient in India for the management of pain.

The Intellis platform offers DTM SCS therapy, a unique differential target multiplexed spinal cord stimulation programming option to treat patients with chronic pain. DTM SCS therapy, which is proven only on the Medtronic Intellis platform, demonstrated statistically significant and superior back pain relief for patients compared to conventional SCS in a randomized controlled trial (RCT).

The RCT revealed that at twelve months, 84% of patients with chronic back pain treated with DTM SCS reported at least 50% pain relief, compared to 51% of patients treated with conventional SCS, as measured by the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), a widely used and accepted measure for pain intensity. Fifty-percent pain relief, as measured by VAS, is a recognized industry standard to define minimum therapy success. At 12-months, 69% of patients reported profound pain relief of 80% or greater compared to 35.1% of patients treated with conventional SCS. The RCT results reported are from 128 patients who were randomized to either the treatment or control arm and 79 subjects who completed 12-month follow-up.

In addition to offering DTM SCS therapy, the Intellis platform is a high-performance SCS device powered by proprietary Overdrive battery technology. It offers three times faster recharge than traditional battery choices and has minimal capacity fade at 9-years (less than 5%). It is optimized for a wide range of energy demands and provides effective long-term pain relief for patients.

“Chronic pain can affect people to the point that they can’t work, eat properly, take part in physical activity, or enjoy life. It can persist beyond the usual recovery period or occur along with a chronic health condition,” said Dr. Doshi. “While it can be challenging to manage chronic pain, attempt is made to reduce the severity of symptoms that come along. Treatment modality like spinal cord stimulation can significantly improve the quality of life by alleviating pain. The Intellis platform is a welcome option to help optimize treatment and improve the outcome in these patients. It may also improve patient-physician communication by tracking and sharing activities, therapy usage and by giving physicians an objective look at treatment progress.”

“Spinal cord stimulation can be an effective alternative or adjunct treatment to other therapies that have failed to manage pain on their own. The Intellis neurostimulator is the world’s smallest implantable spinal cord stimulator. At Medtronic we are constantly designing life-transforming innovations that put patients first,” said Rahul Arora, head of Neurosciences Therapies, Medtronic India.

SCS is one of many therapy options available to treat chronic pain. It involves implanting a neurostimulator under the patients’ skin which delivers mild electrical impulses to the spine to block pain signals from going to the brain. Neurostimulation has been proven to provide effective long-term pain relief and improve quality of life, in addition to being a treatment option for patients interested in trying a non-drug alternative.