Sacral Nerves - Sacral Nerve Stimulation For Treatment of Anal Fissure

Sacral Nerve Stimulation For Treatment of Anal Fissure

Anal fissure is a crack in the epithelium of the anus that causes anal pain and bleeding during or after defecation. The pathogenesis is not well understood and healthy people of all age can be affected.

The most common treatment of chronic anal fissure is surgical intervention. It has reached cure to more than 90%, but it has led to fecal incontinence to 17%-30% of the patients. Drugs have been also used for the treatment in attempt to reduce the sphincter pressure. However, they are not very satisfactory, showing transient action or side effects like headache.

Yakovlev and Karasev (2010) report a case of a woman 20 years old. She was diagnosed with chronic anal fissure and had already used pharmacological treatments which she suffers with headache, incontinence of flatus and the recurrence of the disease. The patient underwent placement of wire leads in the sacrum between S1 and S4 and received stimulation for two weeks 24 hours a day. She reported having no more pain in the 10th day and she got healed of the anal fissure after these two weeks under electrical stimulation. There was not any related complication and the disease did not come back during the 20 months of follow-up.

Thus sacral nerve stimulation (SNS) is a rapid and effective option to treat anal fissures without complications. Also the therapy can be adjusted according to the patient and is completely reversible. In the literature the major complications related to SNS are discomfort and infection (that can afflicted 3% - 17% of patients that underwent SNS).

Read more about this topic:  Sacral Nerves

Famous quotes containing the words nerve, stimulation, treatment and/or fissure:

    Tom: All right, boys. C’mon. Why don’t you say I’m a yellow belly and a big mouth at that?
    Shep: You yellow? Who thinks you’re yellow? Did you hear what he said? A guy who’s got the nerve to marry? That’s more than Flash Gordon ever did.
    Billy Wilder (b. 1906)

    [Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
    William Burroughs (b. 1914)

    that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified
    haste,
    Writhed like lightning, and was gone
    Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
    —D.H. (David Herbert)