Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: EC:3.4.22.6 (chymopapain)
 407 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

To update the status of chymopapain in the treatment of herniated intervertebral discs, a review of the current literature and data from an unpublished Texas study are presented. Studies in animals and humans have consistently demonstrated that chymopapain can dissolve the nucleus pulposus. Twenty-eight uncontrolled and unblinded clinical trials involving 2845 patients showed a positive response rate of 75%. Side effects occurred in 2.4% of chymopapain-treated patients. Anaphylaxis, the most serious adverse reaction associated with chemonucleolysis, was noted in less than 1% of patients. No deaths were reported. The first double-blind, placebo-controlled study of chymopapain in the United States demonstrated no significant efficacy, but both the design and execution of the study have been criticized. Two recent double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showed success rates of 73% and 80% for chymopapain, significantly higher than for placebo treatment. Postinjection back pain and muscle spasm were the most common side effects related to chymopapain administration in one of the trials. In the uncontrolled Texas study the success rate in 408 patients treated by chymopapain was 93%. Chemonucleolysis has achieved a success rate comparable with that of surgery in the treatment of symptomatic herniated discs. Appropriate use of chymopapain can result in substantial savings in time and hospital costs.
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PMID:Update and review of chemonucleolysis. 636 90

The symptom of back pain may be the result of many different pathologies. As such, patients with back pain require careful assessment to determine whether the cause is from the spine or other systems. For acute mechanical back pain, treatment is often symptomatic. Symptomatic treatment may include analgesics, anti-inflammatories and/or muscle relaxants. Patients may also need hypnotics in the short term to help them sleep at night. However, drug therapy should be reduced and stopped as soon as possible. Furthermore, too much bedrest may be counterproductive. Paracetamol (acetaminophen) is the standard treatment for transient back pain. More severe pain may require the addition of an opioid, such as codeine or dextropropoxyphene. Morphine and pethidine (meperidine) may be necessary in patients with back pain due to neoplastic disease or osteoporotic fracture. However, the opioid analgesics are associated with dependence, tolerance and adverse effects. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have analgesic efficacy comparable with paracetamol. Individual patients respond differently to different NSAIDs, and several agents may have to be tried. Long term therapy with NSAIDs is necessary in diseases with an inflammatory component such as ankylosing spondylitis. Calcitonin reduces bone resorption and bone blood flow, and has been suggested to have central analgesic effects. As such, it has been used successfully in patients with Paget's disease, osteolytic bone disease and osteoporosis. Bisphosphonates also inhibit osteoclastic bone resorption and may be useful in Paget's disease, osteolytic metastases and osteoporotic fractures. Other drugs which may be useful in relieving back pain associated with specific circumstances include the tricyclic antidepressants, anxiolytics, antiepileptic agents, corticosteroids, colchicine and chymopapain.
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PMID:Pharmacological management of back pain syndromes. 752 24

Postoperative low-back pain and spasm are the main drawbacks of chymopapain chemonucleolysis. To investigate if low-dose chymopapain could reduce this adverse reaction, without modifying the efficacy, 118 patients with persistent low-back and radicular pain due to a lumbar disc herniation underwent chemonucleolysis. 60 patients were randomly selected to receive 2 mL of standard-dose chymopapain (4,000 units) and 58 to receive 2 mL of low dose (2,000 units). The clinical outcome was assessed on study days 1, 30, and 60, and after 1 year by physicians who were unaware of the treatment, and on the basis of the patients' self evaluation. At day 60, Chemonucleolysis was rated as successful in 81% of the cases by the investigator and in 80% by the patient's self assessment. The percentage of good results was remarkably similar in the two treatment groups and this finding was confirmed after 1 year. There was some evidence that the low-dose treatment resulted in less frequent postoperative back pain but the difference was not statistically significant. Moreover, a comparable incidence of acute low-back pain and spasm was observed in the two treatment groups. Low-dose chemonucleolysis appears to be as effective as the standard dose, but the use of 2,000 units does not significantly lower the postoperative back pain.
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PMID:A randomized, double-blind study to compare low-dose with standard-dose chymopapain in the treatment of herniated lumbar intervertebral discs. 843 22

The combination of percutaneous manual and endoscopic Ho:YAG laser discectomy (PELD) is a new minimal intervention technique in treating patients with herniated lumbar discs that do not penetrate the posterior longitudinal ligament. The results in 100 patients treated with PELD were compared randomly with those in 100 patients treated by chemonucleolysis with chymopapain (CN) and 100 patients treated by automated percutaneous lumbar discectomy (APLD) at the same hospital. We followed the 300 patients postoperatively for 1 year, with physical examination, postoperative plain lumbosacral radiography, CT, MRI and a self-assessment questionnaire. Some 68% of the patients in the PELD group considered the outcome as excellent or good and 23% as fair; the corresponding figures were 55% and 27% in the CN group, and 48% and 32% in the APLD group. Nine percent of the patients in the PELD group underwent open microdiscectomy or were suffering from back pain with sciatica, compared with 18% in the CN group and 20% in the APLD group. PELD showed better extraction of the hernia mass than APLD and a lower rate of low back pain and less decrease in disc height than CN.
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PMID:[Comparison of percutaneous manual and endoscopic laser diskectomy with chemonucleolysis and automated nucleotomy]. 862 46

Chemonucleolysis with chymopapain is a well-documented method of treating lumbar disc herniation. In spite of this, only few patients are treated in this way in Norway. We have offered selected patients chemonucleolysis at our hospital since 1985. This article reports the long-term outcomes as regards employment status, back pain and leg pain. We have treated 277 patients. 269 were still alive in October 1995 and were sent a follow-up questionnaire. 257 patients responded, of whom 36 (14%) had undergone surgery later, due to an unsatisfactory outcome of chemonucleolysis. 72% of the patients were fully employed at the time of follow-up. 61% had little or no back pain, while 69% never or only rarely suffered pain in the leg.
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PMID:[Chemonucleolysis of lumbar disk prolapse. Choice and complications]. 910 74

The herniated lumbar disc (HLD) in adolescent patients is characterized by typical discogenic pain that originates from a soft herniated disc. It is frequently related to back trauma, and sometimes it is also combined with a degenerative process and a bony spur such as posterior Schmorl's node. Chemonucleolysis is an excellent minimally invasive treatment having these criteria: leg pain rather than back pain, severe limitation on the straight leg raising test (SLRT), and soft disc protrusion on computed tomography (CT). Microsurgical discectomy is useful in the cases of extruded or sequestered HLD and lateral recess stenosis due to bony spur because the nerve root is not decompressed with chymopapain. Spinal fusion, like as PLIF, should be considered in the cases of severe disc degeneration, instability, and stenosis due to posterior central bony spur. In our study, 185 adolescent patients, whose follow-up period was more than 1 year (the range was 1-4 years), underwent spinal surgery due to HLD from March, 1998 to December, 2002 at our institute. Among these cases, we performed chemonucleolysis in 65 cases, microsurgical discectomy in 94 cases, and posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) with cages in 33 cases including 7 reoperation cases. The clinical success rate was 91% for chemonucleolysis, 95% for microsurgical disectomy, and 89% for PLIF with cages, and there were no non- union cases for the PLIF patients with cages. In adolescent HLD, chemonucleolysis was the 1st choice of treatment because the soft adolescent HLD was effectively treated with chemonucleolysis, especially when the patient satisfied the chemonucleolysis indications.
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PMID:Surgical treatments for lumbar disc disease in adolescent patients; chemonucleolysis / microsurgical discectomy/ PLIF with cages. 1574 15

Low back pain is the most common cause of disability under the age of 45. The annual incidence of back pain is estimated to be 5% and the lifetime prevalence is 80%. Majority of the patients with persistent symptoms are suffering from radiculopathy that is mainly caused by a herniated nucleus pulposus (HNP). HNP can heal spontaneously due to spontaneous resorption. Besides pressure nucleus pulposus, without any compression, may induce similar changes when applied epidurally to the nerve roots. Nevertheless, combination of chronic mechanical compression and application of nucleus pulposus causes a more pronounced nerve injury. When dual pathophysiology (pressure and inflammatory reaction), spontaneous resorption, and natural course of HNP are taken into account, any treatment modality that eliminates both the pressure and contact of the nucleus pulposus with the nerve root via creating extra time for healing to take place might prove beneficial. These requirements can be provided by spinal balloon nucleoplasty (SBN), which can be used in combination with other treatment modalities such as chymopapain injection. In this hypothetical method, epidural access to the subarachnoid space is established via epidural needles, thereafter a specially designed balloon tipped catheter is advanced. When the catheter is ideally placed with the help of CT or MRI, the balloon at the tip is inflated to relieve pressure and to prevent contact of the nerve root with HNP. The answer to the question, will SBN find a place in clinical practice? is obscure. But a homology can be established with uterine fibroid embolization, which has found clinical use in a period of 30 years approximately.
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PMID:Spinal balloon nucleoplasty: a hypothetical minimally invasive treatment for herniated nucleus pulposus. 1809 23

Herniated disc, while not the most common cause of low back pain, is the most common reason for surgery to relieve back pain. An alternative to surgery when sciatic pain is the result of disc herniation is chemonucleolysis with chymopapain. Since this enzyme is effective only in very specific circumstances, proper patient selection is crucial. Five criteria for selection are presented, emphasizing that since chemonucleolysis is not conservative treatment, it should be reserved for patients whose pain is unrelieved by conservative methods. There are several important contraindications to chemonucleolysis: allergy to chymopapain, risk of injury to the cauda equina, disc lesions at cord levels, pregnancy, patient's age (not recommended for adolescents) and sequestrated disc. Technique is exacting and should be limited to surgeons with the opportunity for concentrated experience.
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PMID:Chemonucleolysis as treatment for herniated lumbar disc. 2127 48

Back pain is the second leading cause of disability among American adults and is currently treated either with conservative therapy or interventional pain procedures. However, the question that remains is whether we, as physicians, have adequate therapeutic options to offer to the patients who suffer from chronic low back pain but fail both conservative therapy and interventional pain procedures before they consider surgical options such as discectomy, disc arthroplasty, or spinal fusion. The purpose of this article is to review the potential novel therapies that are on the horizon for the treatment of chronic low back pain. We discuss medications that are currently in use through different phases of clinical trials (I-III) for the treatment of low back pain. In this review, we discuss revisiting the concept of chemonucleolysis using chymopapain, as the first drug in an intradiscal injection to reduce herniated disc size, and newer intradiscal therapies, including collagenase, chondroitinase, matrix metalloproteinases, and ethanol gel. We also review an intravenous glial cell-derived neurotrophic growth factor called artemin, which may repair sensory nerves compressed by herniated discs. Another new drug in development for low back pain without radiculopathy is a subcutaneous monoclonal antibody acting as nerve growth factor called tanezumab. Finally, we discuss how platelet-rich plasma and stem cells are being studied for the treatment of low back pain. We believe that with these new therapeutic options, we can bridge the current gap between conservative/interventional procedures and surgeries in patients with chronic back pain.
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PMID:Treatment of chronic low back pain - new approaches on the horizon. 2854 69


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