Latest Arachnoiditis News

Monday, 18 September 2006 15:53
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DocSarah writes: One of the recurring themes I hear about is that arachnoiditis seems to be a hidden entity that doesn’t receive much attention within the medical world. Over the past 8 years I have been trying to raise the profile of the condition because until it is more widely recognised, the true extent of the problems arachnoiditis cause will not be realised.

I am currently doing a Masters degree in Pain Management and as part of this, writing a 20,000 word dissertation on Recognition of Adhesive Arachnoiditis. I will be including chapters on the causes of the condition and on the clinical presentation.

I am also writing up a case series of about 10 patients with diagnosed arachnoiditis to illustrate the way in which arachnoiditis arises and how it affects people.

I have also been asked to do a Cochrane Review on the treatment of arachnoiditis. This type of review looks at all the available medical literature on studies that have investigated different treatments.

Unfortunately, there is a marked lack of good quality studies, and most of the literature encompasses case reports and case series. The majority of the treatments I will be reviewing are surgical and the results tend not to be encouraging.

However, I hope that doing the review will highlight the need for good quality research into arachnoiditis and that alongside the MSc dissertation, the two pieces will bring attention to a neglected condition. These two projects are extremely time –consuming so I do not anticipate completing them for a couple of years.

However, I thought it might be encouraging for people to know that work is underway.