A Breakthrough for Chronic Low Back Pain: How the Discseel® Procedure Helps Repair Damaged Discs

All it takes is a few days of low back pain to understand why the condition is so debilitating — even rolling over in bed or getting out of the car can lead to pain. When this pain stretches from days to months to years, your world can shrink, and pain can become the unwelcome center of it all.

This describes the unfortunate circumstances for far too many people. About 65 million Americans have some experience with low back pain, which includes 16 million people who deal with severe and chronic low back pain that places limitations on their lives.

Understanding that the last thing you want to do is add to your pain with surgery, the team at  Apex Pain Specialists, which is headed up by Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy, offers an innovative and nonsurgical solution for some common types of low back pain. Called Discseel®, here’s a look at how this procedure might hold the key to unlocking your chronic back pain.

Low back pain and your discs

There are many different roads to low back pain, and ones that involve your intervertebral discs are very common. 

The 23 discs in your spine act as spacers and cushions between the 33 vertebrae that make up your spine. Any movement in your back and neck is thanks to these discs, which also transfer loads between vertebrae. In other words, your discs work hard when it comes to your overall mobility and support.

To do their work, your discs feature a tough outer layer (annulus fibrosus) that’s largely made of cartilage fibers for strength. Inside each of your discs is a gel-like substance called nucleus pulposus that provides the shock absorption along your spine.

As you go through life, the wear and tear in these discs, combined with aging, can take their toll, making them more brittle and prone to damage. To put some numbers to this, more than 90% of people will have some degeneration in their discs by the time they reach 60. 

While not all of these people develop back pain as a result, plenty do thanks to disc matter that leaks out and irritates nearby nerve roots, which leads to the back pain.

Great examples of this are herniated discs and sciatica, which are some of the most common culprits behind disc-related back pain.

Discseel: Healing damaged discs to stop low back pain

This lead-up brings us to the Discseel procedure, which we’ve found to be a successful and minimally invasive treatment for low back pain due to damaged discs.

With Discseel, we first perform a painless annulogram, which identifies the location of any annular tears in your disc(s). Once we have our targets, we inject an FDA-approved substance called fibrin, a biologic agent that seals tears to keep discs from leaking.

We perform the Discseel procedure right here in our offices in under an hour and you’re free to go home afterward. Over the following 3-12 months, your disc rebuilds and strengthens itself with the fibrin and you regain pain-free movement.

If you’d like to figure out whether your low back pain can be treated with the innovative Discseel procedure, we invite you to call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 today to schedule a consultation. You can also book an appointment online.