[CH] Can hot sauces tame the pain of surgery?

Linda Hutchinson (lipant@sympatico.ca)
Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:41:41 -0400 

Can hot sauces tame the pain of surgery?

Updated Tue. Oct. 30 2007 8:13 AM ET

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Devil's Revenge. Spontaneous Combustion. Hot sauces have names 
like that for a reason. Now scientists are testing if the stuff that makes 
the sauces so savage can tame the pain of surgery.
Doctors are dripping the chemical that gives chili peppers their fire 
directly into open wounds during knee replacement and a few other highly 
painful operations.
Don't try this at home: These experiments use an ultra-purified version of 
capsaicin to avoid infection - and the volunteers are under anesthesia so 
they don't scream at the initial burn.
How could something searing possibly soothe? Bite a hot pepper, and after 
the burn your tongue goes numb.
The hope is that bathing surgically exposed nerves in a high enough dose 
will numb them for weeks, so that patients suffer less pain and require 
fewer narcotic painkillers as they heal.
"We wanted to exploit this numbness," is how Dr. Eske Aasvang, a pain 
specialist in Denmark who is testing the substance, puts it.
Chili peppers have been part of folk remedy for centuries, and heat-inducing 
capsaicin creams are a drugstore staple for aching muscles.
But today the spice is hot because of research showing capsaicin targets key 
pain-sensing cells in a unique way. California-based Anesiva Inc.'s 
operating-room experiments aren't the only attempt to harness that burn for 
more focused pain relief.
Harvard University researchers are mixing capsaicin with another anesthetic 
in hopes of developing epidurals that wouldn't confine women to bed during 
childbirth, or dental injections that don't numb the whole mouth. And at the 
National Institutes of Health, scientists hope early next year to begin 
testing in advanced cancer patients a capsaicin cousin that is 1,000 times 
more potent, to see if it can zap their intractable pain.
Nerve cells that sense a type of long-term throbbing pain bear a receptor, 
or gate, called TRPV1. Capsaicin binds to that receptor and opens it to 
enter only those pain fibres - and not other nerves responsible for other 
kinds of pain or other functions such as movement.
These so-called C neurons also sense heat; thus capsaicin's burn. But when 
TRPV1 opens, it lets extra calcium inside the cells until the nerves become 
overloaded and shut down. That's the numbness.
"It just required a new outlook about ... stimulation of this receptor" to 
turn those cellular discoveries into a therapy hunt, says NIH's Dr. Michael 
Iadarola.
Enter Anesiva's specially purified capsaicin, called Adlea. Experiments are 
under way involving several hundred patients undergoing various surgeries, 
including knee and hip replacements. Surgeons drip either Adlea or a dummy 
solution into the cut muscle and tissue and wait five minutes for it to soak 
in before stitching up the wound.
Among early results: In a test of 41 men undergoing open hernia repair, 
capsaicin recipients reported significantly less pain in the first three 
days after surgery, Aasvang reported this month at a meeting of the American 
Society of Anesthesiologists.
In a pilot U.S. study of 50 knee replacements, the half treated with 
capsaicin used less morphine in the 48 hours after surgery and reported less 
pain for two weeks.
Ongoing studies are testing larger doses in more patients to see if the 
effect is real.
There's a huge need for better surgical pain relief, says Dr. Eugene 
Viscusi, director of acute pain management at Thomas Jefferson University in 
Philadelphia, one of the test sites. Morphine and its relatives, so-called 
opioid painkillers, are surgery's standby. While they're crucial drugs, they 
have serious side effects that limit their use.
Specialists are watching the capsaicin research because it promises a 
one-time dose that works inside the wound, not body-wide, and wouldn't 
tether patients to an IV when they're starting physical therapy.
"It's in and it's done," Viscusi explains. "You can't abuse it. You can't 
misuse it."
"There's been an enormous effort to try and develop alternatives to opioids 
with the same strength but not too much success," adds Dr. Clifford Woolf of 
Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. "We think we're moving toward 
it."
His team is trying a different approach: Standard lidocaine injections numb 
all the surrounding tissue. Woolf and colleagues slipped lidocaine inside 
just pain-sensing neurons, by opening them with a tiny dose of capsaicin. 
Rats given the injections ran around normally while not noticing heat 
applied to their paws, they reported in the journal Nature this month.
That's years away from trying in people, and would have to be done in a way 
to avoid even a quick capsaicin burn.
In a third approach, Iadarola and NIH colleagues hope to soon test a 
capsaicin cousin called resiniferatoxin in advanced cancer patients whose 
pain no longer is relieved by opioids. Injections into the spinal columns of 
cancer-riddled dogs did more than temporarily numb - it severed some nerve 
connections.

Linda
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Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me - I want people
to know WHY I look this way: I've traveled a long way and some of the
roads weren't paved.