Narrator: Dr. Enrico Camporesi, the Medical Director of the new Italian website, launches the site and discusses the importance of research in the field of Complex Regional Pain Syndromes.
Dr. Enrico Camporesi: We are going to talk today about the creation of the website by Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick and the Scientific Advisory Board on Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.
This Disease, this syndrome, has been known with various names over the ages. For instance, because of the high number of soldiers who returned form World War I, with significant disability, this was well known as Sudec's Dystrophy. 
In fact, it is a Complex Pain Syndrome, and more recently has been renamed CRPS, or, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. It has been distinguished into Type I and Type II.
Type I being one where the neural lesions are minor and sometimes reversible. And Type II, instead, where there are more profound neural lesions with probably disconnection of neural tracts.
The disease can be located both in the inferior or superior branches of the sympathetic system. In fact the sympathetic nervous system might not be involved completely and the change in nomenclature reflects the fact that the sympathetic was previously thought to be at the center of the pathophysiology, while today we believe, is only a component in some of these diseases.
The disease presents itself in adults as well as in children and young adults and the variety of techniques used for pain ablation, analgesic therapy and other types of palliative therapy have been enormous. Therefore, it is interesting to see how the clinical studies proposed, utilizing prolonged use of ketamine to the stage of inducing a coma for several days in a patient, may be completely appropriate from the point of risk, because the alternative therapies are often debilitating and disfiguring.
Therefore, it is a pleasure to open up this website, which was translated into Italian by Dr. Guido Camporesi and Dr. Gabriella Camporesi, which I have the honor to know from many, many years and work in Milan at the Institution of the Polyclinic University.
