Predicting Individual Response to Analgesic Treatment in Painful Diabetic Neuropathy

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy [DPN] is caused by diabetes-related metabolic damage to the sensory nervous system. It affects more than 3 million Americans and is leading cause of nerve damage-associated pain worldwide. Currently approved drugs such as gabapentin, pregabalin, and duloxetine provide pain relief only in 1 out of 4 or 5 people with DPN, pointing to a great need to identify effective therapy for these patients. Recent literature suggests that certain methods of assessing sensory nerve function in neuropathic pain patients may provide prediction to individual analgesic response; however, no placebo-controlled studies have been performed with the primary goal of identifying treatment response predictors in DPN.

We propose in this study to examine whether sensory testing to determine mechanical pain threshold [MPT] or heat pain threshold [HPT] will predict the subject's response to IV lidocaine analgesic therapy. We hypothesize that people with painful DPN who have high MPT or HPT are more likely to respond to lidocaine treatment. This is a prospective, double blind, placebo-controlled study with the primary objective of determining whether the results from the sensory testing predict the response to systemic lidocaine in patients with painful DPN.

Consented subjects will attend a screening visit and two intervention visits, during which they will undergo sensory testing and receive intravenous lidocaine or placebo infusion in a cross-over design. At enrollment, each patient will be assigned a study number, which will match a previously prepared computer-generated list of randomization numbers to determine the sequence of interventions: lidocaine and then placebo, or vice versa. An unblinded research nurse coordinator will be assigned to match the study number with randomized treatment sequence, and this person will prepare the study medications, which will look identical. This research nurse coordinator will not be involved at any stage at patient assessment or data analysis. The participants and all other study personnel will be blinded to the treatment allocation.