The UK’s Newcastle Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust has fitted a teenage patient with a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) implant, making the patient the first adolescent in the UK, and one of the first in the world, to receive the neuromodulation therapy to help manage his pain in real time.
18-year-old Ralph Seed from Washington, Tyne and Wear in the UK has lived with foot pain caused by complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) for the past five years. Seed’s pain from the rare disorder proved so extreme he was unable to walk or put pressure on his foot, with the teen at one point questioning doctors about the potential of amputation.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Interventions including painkillers and physiotherapy did little to combat Seed’s pain, prompting surgeons at Newcastle Trust to offer him the option to undergo a procedure to implant Medtronic’s Inceptiv to alleviate his pain. In the UK, SCS implants had previously only been used in adult patients.
Inceptiv is a closed-loop system designed to alter nerve activity by delivering mild electrical currents to disrupt pain signals before they reach the brain. Medtronic secured a CE mark for the SCS in August 2023, and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance in April 2024.
Since Seed was the youngest person to undergo SCS implantation in the UK, ahead of the treatment, his care team trialled the technology with an exploratory operation to insert the connective leads into his lower back to stimulate his spine before the full surgical procedure was undertaken.
The completed procedure was undertaken by Dr Sachin Rastogi, consultant anaesthetist, and functional neurosurgeon Akbar Hussain, consultant neurosurgeon at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, which is part of the Newcastle group. According to the clinicians, the moment the device was switched on following surgery, Seed’s pain “completely vanished”.
Dr Rastogi said: “The results were immediate and unprecedented for a device like this. Seeing the impact of being pain-free for Ralph is simply one of the most moving things I have experienced in my career.
“This type of closed-loop SCS hasn’t been done in the UK before in an adolescent patient with this type of pain. The response has been so dramatic, and that is likely to do with his nervous system being young and highly adaptable.”
SCS is a form of neuromodulation used for treating chronic, severe nerve pain in the trunk, arms, or legs when conservative treatments have failed. A recent report from GlobalData forecasts that the SCS market will be worth $3.5bn in North America in 2033.
At the recent North American Neuromodulation Society (NANS) annual meeting in January, Boston Scientific shared a range of data highlighting the benefits of its SCS therapies. Abbott also shared data from its SCS portfolio at the conference, with a retrospective analysis of over 16,000 patients indicating that the medtech giant’s SCS therapy significantly lowered the number of short- and long-term pain-based healthcare visits by an average of 75% after five years of treatment.
