Abnormal contralateral pain responses from an intradermal injection of phenylephrine in a subset of patients with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)

Abstract

We have examined the effect of an intradermal injection of phenylephrine (1mg/0.1 ml), an alpha-1-adrenoceptor agonist in normal subjects, and patients with sympathetically-independent (SIP) and sympathetically-maintained pain (SMP). Normal subjects and SIP patients experienced only brief stinging pain, while subsets of both sympathectomized and non-sympathectomized SMP patients (6/9 and 4/8, respectively) experienced an additional abnormal pain response accompanied by mechano-allodynia around the injection site. Both the normal and abnormal pain response after intradermal phenylephrine are similar to those observed with intradermal norepinephrine. In contrast to previous reports in the literature, we found that three sympathectomized SMP patients (who, however, had failed to experience pain relief after surgical sympathectomy despite very good relief after sympathetic blocks) also experienced abnormal pain and mechano-allodynia when phenylephrine was injected to a limb contralateral to the symptomatic sympathectomized extremity. Abnormal pain response evoked by norepinephrine or phenylephrine injection in the ipsilateral symptomatic limb of SMP patients may be due to injury-evoked nociceptor responsiveness to catecholamines. However, such a response in contralateral asymptomatic limbs suggests an additional factor that more likely than not is of central origin and may or may not be related to sympathectomy and its success or failure to treat pain.