PALM SPRINGS, California — Contrary to expectations, smoking and obesity do not appear to affect the efficacy of, or increase the infection rate related to, spinal cord stimulator implantation, a new study shows.
"It's very well known that smoking, for example, can increase the risk of infection and of complications in different types of major surgery, especially spinal surgery," but there are few data on smoking and spinal cord stimulation, said lead author N. Nick Knezevic, MD, PhD, vice chair for research and education and clinical associate professor, Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago.
"We advise our patients to stop smoking before we do this procedure because we're afraid of infections and complications," he said. And despite these new findings, physicians should still advise smokers to quit and overweight patients to lose weight, said Dr Knezevic.
"We showed that there's really no difference in the efficacy of the spinal cord stimulation in all of the groups we looked at," he told Medscape Medical News. "That doesn't mean that we should not encourage patients to stop smoking and lose some weight, but that should not be the limiting factors when planning to do spinal cord stimulation."
He presented his study here at the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) 2016 Annual Meeting.
