A whopping seven out of 10 patients who had undergone lower leg amputations in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape experience phantom limb pain - a painful sensation felt in the region of a limb that has recently been amputated. On the back of this, a groundbreaking research study led by Dr Katleho Limakatso, an honorary research fellow in the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine, found that a dearth of pre-amputation education and mental health support programmes at tertiary hospital level is to blame. Dr Limakatso is currently completing his post-doctoral research fellowship at the Bionics Institute of the University of Melbourne.
He said his latest work builds on a previous research study - a systematic review and meta-analysis that measured the global prevalence and risk factors of phantom limb pain in patients around the world. Similarly, he said, the global study (which pooled 37 surveys from various countries) also revealed that seven out of ten patients (64%) experience phantom limb pain. "[But] no study at the time reported on the prevalence of phantom limb pain in the African context.
" "[But] no study at the time reported on the prevalence of phantom limb pain in the African context. And there was no way of extrapolating our global study findings and localising it, because of disparities in patient demographics and socio-economic determinants of pain between developed and developing nations," he said. Localising the pain.