Efficacy of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation in people with pain after spinal cord injury: a meta-analysis

STUDY DESIGN: Meta-analysis. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation in people with pain after spinal cord injury by meta-analysis. METHODS: Reviewed PubMed, Embase, Cochrane library, as well as China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang, and Vip databases to search the randomized controlled trials of pain after spinal cord injury through transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation from the beginning of the library to March 2021, and analyze the literature with RevMan 5.3 software and the bias in the literature with STATA 12.0 software. RESULTS: There are six randomized controlled trials in the study with 165 cases. 83 cases in the test group were given transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, and 82 cases in the control group used sham stimulation or other treatments. Meta-analysis results showed the experimental group’s visual analog scale (MD = −1.52, 95%CI, −2.44 to −0.60, P = 0.001) and short-form McGill pain questionnaire scores (MD = −0.70, 95% CI, −1.03 to −0.25, P = 0.002) were lower than those of the control group. CONCLUSIONS: Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation has some clinical therapeutic effects on persons with pain after spinal cord injury, but due to the lack of literature, the sample size is not large, and clinical trials need to be further improved later.