Regional anesthesia and pain medicine
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Reg Anesth Pain Med · Jan 2022
Consensus practice guidelines on interventions for cervical spine (facet) joint pain from a multispecialty international working group.
The past two decades have witnessed a surge in the use of cervical spine joint procedures including joint injections, nerve blocks and radiofrequency ablation to treat chronic neck pain, yet many aspects of the procedures remain controversial. ⋯ Cervical medial branch radiofrequency ablation may provide benefit to well-selected individuals, with medial branch blocks being more predictive than intra-articular injections. More stringent selection criteria are likely to improve denervation outcomes, but at the expense of false-negatives (ie, lower overall success rate). Clinical trials should be tailored based on objectives, and selection criteria for some may be more stringent than what is ideal in clinical practice.