Abbott’s neuromodulation systems reduce healthcare visits due to pain And deliver sustained relief

Abbott announced new five-year data demonstrating that its neuromodulation therapies, including its proprietary BurstD spinal cord stimulation waveform and dorsal root ganglion stimulation technology, can significantly reduce pain-related healthcare visits for people living with chronic pain.

Note that chronic pain affects more than one in five people in the U.S. and is estimated to cost $722.8 billion annually, including $530.6 billion in medical care and $192.2 billion in lost productivity. People with chronic pain pay an average of $8,068 more in healthcare expenses and lose $2,923 in productivity each year than those without the condition. As much as 69% of the direct cost of medical treatment for a pain diagnosis can be attributed to office visits and hospital stays.

“Chronic pain is often a time-intensive and costly condition for people to live with, not only because of the number of office visits they must make to manage their pain, but also due to the need for repeat diagnostic imaging, physical therapy, medications and time away from work,” said Timothy Deer, M.D., DABPM, president and chief executive officer of the Spine and Nerve Centers of the Virginias in Charleston, W.Va. , and lead author on the study. “With spinal cord stimulation, we can dramatically reduce the burden placed on patients who suffer from chronic pain and help them return to a level of normality that many of them believe they have lost.”

In addition, the long-term patient preference and sustained benefit were also demonstrated in a separate study of 127 patients evaluating Abbott’s proprietary BurstDR stimulation. At five years, 92% of patients reported a preference for BurstDR, which uses pulses or bursts of mild electrical energy to change pain as it travels from the spinal cord to the brain and is preferred to traditional “tingling” tonic stimulation. Patients using Abbott’s SCS system also reported sustained improvements in pain relief and physical function, along with reductions in pain catastrophizing to the level of a normal, healthy population, beginning at six months post-implant and maintained for over five years.

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Related Topics and Keywords

Abbott, Abbott Neuromodulation Systems, pain relief