Duke Anesthesiology’s Satya Achanta, DVM, PhD, has been awarded a two-year industry-sponsored grant to evaluate spinal cord stimulation as a potential non-pharmacological therapy to treat lower back pain using swine models
Lower back pain affects at least 84% of adults in the United States at some point in their lives. Women have high prevalence for lower back pain. With this funding, Achanta and his team will develop a swine model of lower back pain and then evaluate novel spinal cord stimulation approach.
“While opioid use disorder and fatal opioid overdose cases have been declared as national crisis in the United States by the White House, I am hoping that non-pharmacological interventions such as spinal cord stimulation may offer hope for the chronic debilitating lower back pain,” says Achanta, assistant professor in anesthesiology. “Further, I am also excited that this is the first funding opportunity within Duke’s Center for Translational Pain Medicine (CTPM) for studying pain in non-rodent preclinical studies. I hope that the research outcomes from this study will pave the way for additional large animal pain studies within CTPM.”