Pain
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Prognostic factors for poor recovery in acute whiplash patients.
The objective of our prospective inception cohort study was to identify prognostic factors for poor recovery in patients with whiplash-associated disorders grade 1 or 2 who still had neck pain and accompanying complaints 2 weeks after the accident. The study was carried out in a primary health care setting in The Netherlands and included 125 patients. The primary outcome measure was functional recovery defined in terms of neck pain intensity or work disability without medication use. ⋯ The accuracy of the predictions of the prognostic models was high, meaning that the models adequately distinguished patients with poor recovery from those regarded as recovered. These findings add to the growing body of evidence, indicating that socio-demographic, physical and psychological factors affect short- and long-term outcome after whiplash injury. Our findings also indicate that care providers can easily identify patients at risk for poor recovery with a visual analogue scale for initial pain intensity and work-related activities.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Auricular acupuncture for pain relief after total hip arthroplasty - a randomized controlled study.
Auricular acupuncture (AA) is known to be effective in treatment of various pain conditions, but still there have been no randomized controlled studies of AA for treatment of acute postoperative pain. Therefore we tested whether AA of specific points is superior to sham acupuncture for complementary analgesia after total hip arthroplasty in a patient-anesthesiologist-evaluator-analyst blinded study. The patients were randomly allocated to receive true AA (lung, shenmen, thalamus and hip points) or sham procedure (4 non-acupuncture points on the auricular helix). ⋯ Pain intensity on VAS-100 and incidence of analgesia-related side effects were similar in both groups. The differences between the groups as regard patients' opinions concerning success of blinding were not significant. Findings from our study demonstrate that AA could be used to reduce postoperative analgesic requirement.