Surgical management of intramedullary cavernous angiomas and analysis pain relief

The objective of this study was to conduct a retrospective analysis of the clinical characteristics of 20 individuals with intramedullary cavernous angiomas (ICA) presented with serious pain complaints. This study was to investigate the efficacy of short- and long-term pain relief following surgical resection.

Between 2006 and 2012, 55 patients with ICA were surgically managed in our institution. Of these 20 (36.4%) patients presented with serious pain as a unique clinical feature. Numerical pain scores (NPS: 0-10) were used to assess the patients' pain levels preoperatively, as well as at 1 month and 1 year postoperatively. All the patients had magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) preoperatively and during follow-up. IBM SPSS Statistics 19.0 was used to analysis the outcomes.

Of the 20 patients with ICA, 9 (45%) required cervical and 11 (55%) thoracic surgery. Seven (35%) patients presented with radicular pain and 13 (65%) presented with central pain. Pain improved from a total mean preoperative score of 8.60 to total mean score of 2.95 (P < 0.01) at one month and 3.35 (P < 0.01) at one year post-surgery. However, the pain symptoms completely disappeared in the long-term follow-up only in three (15%) patients. Five (25%) patients reported new pain symptoms with no lesion reoccurrence postoperatively.

Pain is the common complaint in patients with ICA. Surgery is effective in providing short- and long-term pain relief. However, long-term follow-up measures on postoperative pain levels show that the pain does recur in the months following surgery.