Radiofrequency treatment of cancer pain

cancer pain can be adequately treated in most patients using relatively simple methods such as the regular administration of non opioid or opioid analgesics. The remaining patients, especially those with neurogenic or incident-type pain, are less responsive to these methods and may require more aggressive approaches, such as neuro invasive or neuroablative procedures. The neuroablative procedures aim to interrupt an afferent conduction pathway at different levels. Improvement of physiologic and functional knowledge of pain transmission associated to the use of radiofrequency techniques have made it possible to achieve a progressively increasing selectivity of the neurosurgical lesions. In the clinical setting different neuroablative procedures performed with radiofrequency coagulation technique are use to manage intractable cancer pain.