Original ResearchA preliminary study of transcranial direct current stimulation for the treatment of refractory chronic pelvic pain
Section snippets
Methods and Materials
This is a single-center, phase-II, double-blind, sham-controlled, crossover clinical trial to prospectively investigate the efficacy of tDCS treatment in reducing chronic pelvic pain in a cohort of patients with refractory chronic pelvic pain. Conduct of this study was performed according to an institutional review board-approved investigational protocol at Summa Health System. Seven patients were randomly assigned to receive either active or sham tDCS at the first, 2-day treatment session.
Results
Seven patients with a mean age of 38 years (range: 24-36 years) participated in the study. All patients had a previous history of abuse, gynecologic pain, and IC. All patients were either in natural menopause or undergoing medical or surgical induction of amenorrhea. All but one patient had myofascial pain syndrome in addition to the other pain generators listed. Patients had an average 80 months of pain, had seen an average of four previous physicians, had undergone an average of three
Discussion
In this pilot study, tDCS was well tolerated and moderately effective in decreasing symptom scores from chronic pelvic pain. A regimen of 2 days of treatment, followed by 2 weeks of symptom recording was chosen to decrease the possibility that there would be a lingering effect from the active treatment for those patients randomly assigned to receive that arm first. Although shorter than the usual number of days of active tDCS used in other treatment protocols, this was a pilot study designed to
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