SP Pain met during recent EAN Congress in Amsterdam. Co-chair Nadine Attal from France welcomed members and presented last year panel’s activities.
Last year was successful. SP Pain co-chairs Nadine Attal and Giorgio Cruccu had, together with members of SP Pain and members of The International Association for the Study of Pain Special Interest Group on Neuromodulation, published a new “EAN guidelines on central neurostimulation therapy in chronic pain conditions. (Eur J Neurol. 2016; 23:1489-99)”. In their review, they found weak evidence for several types of neurostimulation and an utterly inconclusive effect of Deep Brain Stimulation in the assessed chronic pain conditions. Since quality of evidence is poor to moderate, future large-scale multicentre studies of non-invasive and invasive neurostimulation are proposed, focused on the duration, quality and severity of pain.
Ongoing panel activity is education. Panel members agreed, that it is important to prepare Neurology Update, Breaking News, texts on neurological scales, historical papers and educational papers for the EAN pages.
We also believe that pain is an important neurological topic, which should always be present at the EAN congress. At this year congress in Amsterdam, SP Pain organized an Interactive Session “A complex clinical case of chronic widespread pain”. Participants learned about the screening tools, diagnostic algorithm, role of complementary investigations, pharmacotherapy and non-drug treatments for neuropathic pain. This Session was well-attended. We are working on the SP Pain proposals for the EAN congress in Oslo, 2019.
Finally, we launched an ongoing web questionnaire – “Survey on diagnostic issues regarding Trigeminal Neuralgia” proposed by Fabio Antonaci, co-chair SP Headache and Martin Rakusa, member of SP Pain, with the scientific support of Giorgio Cruccu. Aim of the study is to investigate the occurrence of diagnostic and therapeutic errors, to improve the clinical and diagnostic investigations in affected patients. On behalf of the SP Pain and SP Headache, we invite all colleagues from the European Academy of Neurology to fulfil the questionnaire whenever they see a patient with trigeminal neuralgia (for the first time or at follow up) by December 1st, 2017. The survey is easy to access on the EAN website in pdf or online form. In the case of pdf form, please send a scan to Antonaci@unipv.it.
by Martin Rakusa1, 2 and Nadine Attal2,3
1Department of Neurology, University Medical Centre Maribor, Slovenia.
2 EAN Scientific Panel Pain, Vienna, Austria.
3INSERM U-987, Centre d’Evaluation et de Traitement de la Douleur, Hôpital Ambroise Paré AP-HP, Boulogne-Billancourt and Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin, Versailles, France.
