Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a degenerative joint disease that leads to significant pain and functional disability affecting over 30% of older adults making it one of the most common and debilitating conditions related to aging. This disease results in a loss of mobility, reduced quality of life, and increased likelihood of a need for nursing home care. Reduced mobility represents a downward spiral for elderly individuals that impacts overall health and the ability to interact with their environment and families. In addition to aging, the prevalence of obesity in the overall population increases the likelihood of this condition in younger individuals impacting their long-?term health and their participation in the workforce. KOA patients have significant pain with weight bearing, poor physical function, and widely variable response rates to pharmacological and invasive treatments. In addition, KOA patients are highly susceptible to chronic opioid use. Clinicians are continuously looking for alternative interventions in patients that have failed conservative therapy. These interventions should have less adverse effects, be less invasive and expensive than knee arthroplasty (which also has significant persistent postsurgical pain). One common alternative option to analgesics or opioids is anesthetic nerve blocks to reduce both acute and chronic pain. However, anesthetic nerve blocks require a visit to a doctors office preventing the patient from obtaining the pain relief immediately when it is needed, and limiting access to treatment for patients with transportation issues. On demand electrical nerve block (OD-?ENB), is a means of electrically anesthetizing a peripheral nerve for the treatment of chronic pain and other disorders. The use of an OD-?ENB device would provide the patient the ability to immediately suppress their pain symptoms. Further, because the technology is based on the fundamental principle of electrical nerve block, there are no short or long-?term side-?effects other than the inactivation of the targeted nerve. The treatment is completely non-?addicting and thus provides an excellent alternative to pharmacological treatments. In addition, dosing with the ON-?ENB system is not limited because there are no dose-?related toxicity effects. Our current proposal would involve the development of a miniature nerve block device that could be injected next to the nerve to provide localized nerve block. The device would be externally powered under the control of the user and a single external control unit could power more than one device. This makes it an ideal solution for treatment of KOA. Public Health Relevance Statement Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease that leads to significant pain for many aging adults and its prevalence is increasing in younger adults. Many treatment options are available with moderate success and often patients can become reliant, and even addicted, to narcotics. In this work, we are proposing to develop a small implantable electrical nerve block device for pain management without the use of narcotics. NIH Spending Category No NIH Spending Category available.
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