Spine
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Systematic review. ⋯ The spine care community needs to develop (or update) high-quality treatment guidelines. The process should be transparent, methodologically rigorous, and consistent with the Appraisal of Guidelines Research and Evaluation and Institute of Medicine recommendations. This effort should be collaborative across specialty/society groups and would benefit from patient and public input. Payer policies and treatment guidelines need to be transparent and based on the highest quality evidence available. Clinicians from specialty/society groups, guideline developers and policy makers should collaborate on their development. This process would also benefit from public and patient input.
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Systematic review of literature focused on heterogeneity of treatment effect analysis. ⋯ We recommend optimizing the management of medical co-morbidities and smoking cessation before considering surgical fusion in CLBP patients. Strength of recommendation: Weak.
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Systematic review. ⋯ There currently are many classification systems for CLBP; some that are descriptive, some prognostic, and some that attempt to direct treatment. We recommend that no one classification system be adopted for all purposes. We further recommend that future efforts in developing a classification system focus on one that helps to direct both surgical and nonsurgical treatments.
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Systematic review. ⋯ Clinical recommendations were made where appropriate using the GRADE/Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality approach, which imparts a deliberate separation between the quality of the evidence (i.e., high, moderate, low, or inconclusive) from the strength of the recommendation. The quality of evidence plays only a part as the strength of the recommendation reflects the extent to which we can, across the range of patients for whom the recommendations are intended, be confident that desirable effects of a management strategy outweigh undesirable effects.
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Systematic review. ⋯ Recommendation 1: When surgically treating CLBP, we recommend administering both a VAS for pain and a condition-specific physical measure such as the ODI before and after surgical intervention as these outcomes are the most treatment specific and responsive to change. Strength of recommendation: Strong.Recommendation 2: When evaluating the surgical outcomes for CLBP in the clinical-research setting, we recommend selecting a shorter version for measuring general HRQoL (e.g., SF-12, EQ-5D) to minimize clinician and patient burden. Strength of recommendation: Strong.