Cervical Discogenic Pain Treatment with Percutaneous Jellified Ethanol: Preliminary Experience

BACKGROUND: Percutaneous DiscoGel® (Gelscom SAS, France), introduced in 2007 as a promising new minimal invasive technique, showed efficacy and safety in lumbar spine surgery, with limited use and scientific reports with regard to the cervical spine. Since the first publication of its use on the cervical spine (2010), less than 100 cases have been published. We introduce an initial experience with this relatively new procedure. We hypothesized that percutaneous DiscoGel® is a safe and effective option for chronic neck pain of cervical discogenic origin. METHOD: This was a clinical study on 10 patients with chronic discogenic pain operated on for 18 cervical discs with percutaneous DiscoGel®. Inclusion criteria were patients with chronic axial or referred neck pain with MRI showing a cervical disc that is consistent with patient symptoms and failed conservative treatment. Exclusion criteria were clinical myelopathy, motor deficit, severe stenosis or reduced disc height by more than 50%, or previous cervical spine surgery. RESULTS: A total of 10 cases consisting of 6 females and 4 males underwent treatment with percutaneous DiscoGel® for 18 cervical discs. C5/C6 was the most affected level. The mean preoperative VAS score was 8; the postoperative VAS scores at 6 weeks and 3 months were 2.2 and 2.9, respectively. There were no postoperative complications or neurological deficits. CONCLUSION: The present study has the limitation of the small number of cases; however, with the limited number of studies and less than 100 published cases in the literature, this initial work shows that cervical percutaneous DiscoGel® is an effective minimally invasive bridging option between conservative and open surgical treatment for cervical discogenic pain, with a high success rate. The differentiation of pain types (nociceptive, referred, radicular, and trapezius myalgia) that can coexist is crucial for procedure selection and improving treatment outcome.