About 3.8 Million persons in Germany suffer from chronic pain with a relevant physical and social impairment representing approximately 7% of the population. Chronic pain conditions include patients with neuropathic pain such as trigeminal neuralgia, post-zoster pain or pain after amputations. There is a significant number of patients with pain without response to optimised drug therapy. Especially in these chronic pain patients there is data demonstrating maladaptive plasticity as pathophysiological evidence of structural changes in brain connectivity. Patients are treated with multimodal pain therapy concepts including interventional procedures with nerve infiltration techniques.~One innovative therapeutic option for pain patients is transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): In recent clinical trials, patients reported on reduced overall pain intensity following tDCS stimulation series shown e.g. from Bolognini et al., Antal et al. and most recently from Volz and colleagues. However, there is no current data available evaluating a role of tDCS for patients with chronic neuropathic pain treated with regional anaesthesiological techniques.~Objective: To evaluate effect of additional tDCS series on pain in patients with chronic neuropathic pain~Primary study endpoint: relative reduction in pain (initial VAS measured versus VAS after completion of the therapy series) as a numeric value between 0 and 10.
This study evaluates the effect of additional transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS) on pain in patients with chronic neuropathic pain undergoing treatment with regional anaesthesiological techniques.