title: Impact of Scrambler Therapy on Pain Management and Quality of Life in Cancer Patients: A Study of Twenty Cases.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To study the effect of scrambler therapy on patients with chronic cancer pain.
  
  
  METHODS
  This is a prospective, observational study conducted on patients with chronic pain due to malignancy which is not responding to oral analgesics. A total of twenty patients were included in the study (ten males, ten females) with a visual analog scale score of >4 on oral analgesics. Patients aged 18-70 years with a life expectancy of >3 months having bony, neuropathic, or mixed type of pain were included in the study. A total of 12 sessions of scrambler therapy were planned, ten sessions on consecutive days and one session each on two follow-up visits after 1 week each. Each session lasted for 40 min. Pain relief and quality of life according to the World Health Organization Quality of Life were recorded as primary outcome variables.
  
  
  RESULTS
  All patients had good pain relief and improvement in all four domains of quality of life. Pain scores decreased significantly (P< 0.01) after each session and at each follow-up. Patients showed significant improvement in physical, psychological, social, and environmental health (P< 0.01) after the therapy.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Scrambler therapy offers a promising role in the pain physician's armamentarium as an adjunct to pharmacological therapy for the treatment of chronic drug-resistant cancer pain; it may bring down analgesic drug requirements significantly and improve quality of life in cancer patients. Larger prospective, randomized multicenter studies are needed to validate the findings of the small pilot studies published in literature so far.
authors.affiliation: Department of Onco-Anaesthesia and Palliative Medicine, Dr. B.R.A. Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital, All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Komal
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kashyap
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, BLK Super Speciality Hospital, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Saurabh
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Joshi
authors.affiliation: Department of Onco-Anaesthesia and Palliative Medicine, Dr. B.R.A. Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital, All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Saurabh
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vig
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Vishwajeet
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.affiliation: Department of Onco-Anaesthesia and Palliative Medicine, Dr. B.R.A. Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital, All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Sushma
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bhatnagar
keywords: Chronic pain; World Health Organization Quality of Life; scrambler therapy; visual analog scale scores