ArticlePain and therapy2020
The Efficacy of Radiofrequency Ablation for Pain Management in Patients with Pre-Existing Hardware at the Site of Ablation.
Article in Pain and therapy, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Radiofrequency Ablation for Chronic Pain: Mechanistic Insights and Emerging Innovations.Cureus · 2025Review
- Lumbar Radiofrequency Ablation (LRFA)- Myths and Facts: A Narrative Review of the Literature.Current pain and headache reports · 2025Review
- Cooled Radiofrequency Ablation of Thoracic Medial Branches for the Treatment of Chronic Thoracic Pain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Review
- Failed back surgery syndrome-terminology, etiology, prevention, evaluation, and management: a narrative review.Journal of Yeungnam medical science · 2024Article
- Mitigating Factors in L4 and L5 Medial Branch Motor Stimulation During Radiofrequency Ablation.Current pain and headache reports · 2024Review
- FactFinders for patient safety: Motor stimulation testing in lumbar radiofrequency neurotomy and radiofrequency neurotomy in patients with posterior hardware.Interventional pain medicine · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionRadiofrequency ablation (RFA) is an interventional procedure that provides pain relief by using thermal energy to disrupt peripheral nerves carrying nociceptive signals back to the central nervous system. In the past, having implantable hardware at the planned site of RFA was considered to confer increased risk of adverse outcomes given the theoretical risk of heating of the hardware components. The present study examines patient outcomes to determine whether the efficacy of RFA was affected by the presence of implanted hardware directly at the site.
methodsThis was a retrospective case-control study that included 52 patients who received RFA procedures in the presence of hardware at the site of RFA and a control group of 170 patients who received RFA procedures in the absence of hardware. Data were collected from electronic medical records entered into an Excel sheet and then analyzed using SPSS version 22. Outcomes tested included post procedure pain scores, percent, and duration of improvement, if any.
resultsWe found no statistically significant difference in measured outcomes between either group.
conclusionsThis study provides some evidence in support of the theory that RFA procedures performed on patients with pre-existing hardware have similar efficacy when compared to their hardware-free counterparts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.