India Medtronic, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Medtronic PLC 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.
 
More than 19% of the Indian adult population suffers from chronic pain of some kind. Respondents of an epidemiological telephonic survey with chronic pain in India were no longer able to exercise, sleep, maintain relationships with friends and family, and maintain an independent lifestyle. About 32% of patients lost ≥4 hours of work.
 
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.
 
“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.