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To the Editor: We read with great interest the article by Cohen et al., and we complement the authors on such a well-designed randomized study. Cohen et al. highlight the importance of improving diagnostic efficacy of cervical medial branch blocks by injecting two different volumes (0.25 and 0.5 ml) of injectate. We note from the results that three nerves were missed in each treatment group, indicating a 93% accuracy rate. Thus, missing the nerve is more of a “technical challenge” rather than being due to the volume of local anesthetic injected (0.25 vs. 0.5 ml). As shown in table 1 of their article, the authors note that six (54.5%) of the medial branch blocks with 0.25 ml versus three (25%) of the medial branch blocks with 0.5 ml received greater than 50% pain relief. Decreasing the volume of local anesthetic by 50% led to doubling (from 25 to 54.5%) of pain relief. Cohen et al. then comment in the discussion section: “it is interesting to note that the higher incidence of inadvertent spread to untargeted nervous tissue did not translate to reduced pain scores in the 0.5 ml.” This leads us to conclude that if this is truly the case, that decreasing the volume of injectate to improve the diagnostic accuracy led to increased prevalence of pain relief, then the volume injected does not really matter in improved outcomes. That is to say, using volumes of 0.25 or 0.5 ml will produce similar outcomes in diagnostic cervical medial branch blocks with comparable true positive rates (93%).

anesthesiology

Different Injectate Volumes in Cervical Medial Branch Blocks: Does Increased Diagnostic Accuracy with Smaller Injectate Volume Lead to Changes in Outcome?