Pain practice : the official journal of World Institute of Pain
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Low back pain is the leading cause of years lost to disability worldwide. Approximately 15% to 45% of chronic low back pain is due to facet joint arthropathy. Currently, no large-scale retrospective studies have investigated long-term clinical predictors of success in individuals receiving radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of the medial branches for facet joint arthropathy. ⋯ Our results suggest that patients prescribed opioids, particularly at higher dosages, may find less pain relief 1 year following RFA for facetogenic pain. Additionally, patients with higher pre-procedural VAS pain scores may be more likely to have a positive response at 1 year.
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Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is effective for patients with failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS). SCS improves their pain, as well as their functionality and health-related quality of life. Different waveforms for SCS have emerged that show improvement in small prospective studies. Analysis of real-world data shows the clinical implementation and the effect of different waveforms in SCS. ⋯ This study of SCS showed significant long-term improvement in pain, disability, and quality of life in a large dataset of patients with FBSS. Strict selection procedures and a strong opioid policy contributed to the high success rate and low unanticipated explantation rate. There was no difference in pain reduction between tonic and HF10 stimulation. Further investigation is necessary to detect any difference between other waveforms of SCS.
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To date, there have been no acceptable and accurate diagnostic criteria or standards of care for the management of sacroiliac joint (SIJ) pain. Several studies have yielded different contributions of clinical presentation, history, and physical examination in the diagnosis of SIJ pain. Our goal in this study was to assess the sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic clinical tests and their predictive value in accurately diagnosing SIJ pain. ⋯ In conclusion, our study results were similar to those of previous investigators who found that physical examination plays a limited role in diagnosing SIJ pain. Specifically, we found that the clinical tests and/or their combinations added no significant predictive capacity compared to patients' baseline characteristics in predicting the response to diagnostic SIJ injection, albeit the combination of the Mekhail and Patrick tests yielded high sensitivity (94%), making them viable for consecutive screening, possibly reducing the unnecessary costs of diagnostic SIJ injection procedures.