الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Cervical radiculopathy (CR) is a disabling medical condition characterized by radicular discomfort in one or both upper limbs, as well as sensory, motor, and reflex abnormalities in one or more of the affected nerve root distributions.
Previous research has been undertaken to assess the efficacy of PRF for the treatment of radicular pain. However, the size of disc herniation will not decrease using PRF resulting in continued mechanical compression of the nerve root as well as chemical irritation.
In this study, we theorized that adding intradiscal ozone therapy to PRF could improve the clinical outcome of the patients through inducing disc shrinkage resulting in relief of nerve root compression as well as decreasing chemical irritation.
The aim of this study was to compare between pulsed DRG RF at the cervical root combined with intradiscal ozone injection and pulsed RF alone for treatment of patients with discogenic cervical radiculopathy.
The present study was carried out on 60 patients with cervical radiculopathy in a randomized clinical trial. Patients were randomly allocated by a computer based program into three groups, one group was subjected to PRF combined with intradiscal ozone, another group was subjected to PRF alone, the third group was subjected to diagnostic blocks only as a control group.
Our study showed that PRF combined with intradiscal ozone and pulsed RF alone had good clinical outcome when compared to control group in terms of reduction of pain, need of medications, neck disability index and need for surgery, however the difference between both active treatments failed to reach statistical significance at 1 year follow up.
Combining intradiscal ozone injection with pulsed RF yielded mostly similar results as pulsed RF alone. This may give the impression that adding intradiscal ozone therapy to PRF has no added value and should be discarded. However, the insignificant difference between PRF with added intradiscal ozone and PRF alone that was observed at 1 year follow up is actually expected as PRF usually has significant results observed at this time frame of follow up.
The added value of the intradiscal ozone therapy with the consequent reduction of the disc size could be obvious at a later time of follow up when the therapeutic effect of PRF wanes and the therapeutic response of disc size reduction by intradiscal ozone becomes more obvious.