Articles: low-back-pain.
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Systematic review of clinical guidelines. ⋯ The quality and transparency of the development process and the consistency in the reporting of primary care guidelines for low back pain need to be improved.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Dose-response for chiropractic care of chronic low back pain.
There have been no trials of optimal chiropractic care in terms of number of office visits for spinal manipulation and other therapeutic modalities. ⋯ There was a positive, clinically important effect of the number of chiropractic treatments for chronic low back pain on pain intensity and disability at 4 weeks. Relief was substantial for patients receiving care 3 to 4 times per week for 3 weeks.
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Chronic lumbar discogenic pain (CLDP) impairs the patient's physical abilities to function within the normal physiologic loading ranges of activities of daily living. The pathogenesis of CLDP is multifactorial and not well understood. Conservative therapeutic regimens often fail to achieve sufficient pain relief. Surgical options vary greatly in surgical invasiveness as well as outcome. Definitive surgical treatment is often 360-degree fusion. The morbidity associated with this approach is significant, considering that only 65% to 80% of patients obtain satisfactory clinical results. This has spawned interest in minimally invasive surgical options, such as intradiscal electrothermal therapy (IDET; ORATEC Interventions, Inc., Menlo Park, CA), but results are conflicting. ⋯ Posterolateral transforaminal SED and radiofrequency thermal annuloplasty were used to interrupt the purported annular defect pain sensitization process, thought to be necessary in the genesis of chronic lumbar discogenic pain. Lack of clinical benefit from the subject procedure did not degrade any subsequent surgical or nonsurgical treatment options. The experience gained from this study warrants further investigation into the cellular and molecular processes that provided back pain relief in these patients.
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Antagonistic trunk muscle activity is normally required to stabilize the spine. A lumbosacral orthosis (LSO) might reduce the need for this antagonistic activity by providing passive stiffness to the trunk and increasing spine stability. The maximum reduction in trunk muscle EMG and in the resultant spine compression force due to the LSO was estimated using a biomechanical model. ⋯ The resultant spine compression force averaged across all tasks decreased by only 355 N. A much larger variance of the experimental data precluded the detection of these effects at statistically significant levels. However, the small effects size does not necessarily exclude the possibility of functional benefits of slightly reducing muscle activity in patients with low back pain.
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Eur J Orthop Surg Tr · Sep 2004
Correlative analysis of reliability and validity of plain radiology, MOS short-form health survey and surgical examination in making decision for treatment of chronic low back pain patients.
The aim of this study was to determine inter- and intraobserver agreement between spine surgeons and orthopedic radiologists in recognizing distinct degenerative pathology on plain lumbosacral roentgenograms; to estimate the validity (sensitivity and specificity) to make a surgical decision by correlating Short form-36 Health Survey (SF-36) scores and roentgenographic degenerative pathology; and to determine the intra- and interobserver agreement between radiologists, surgeons, and authors in making a surgical decision for treatment on the basis of distinct roentgenographic pathology, SF-36 scores, clinical findings derived from physical examination, or combined. The authors followed three routes to objectively assess the reliability and validity of the surgical decision in chronic low back pain patients: First, 100 consecutive male patients who suffered from low back pain were examined by the authors physically, using imaging techniques (including plain roentgenograms, CT-scan, or/and MRI), and SF-36 survey. Two senior orthopedic radiologists and two senior spine surgeons were asked to read blinded a set of 100 roentgenograms of the lumbar spine in two sessions. ⋯ This investigation showed that distinct degenerative lumbar spinal pathology can be identified on plain roentgenographs with similarly high accuracy by orthopedic, radiologists, and spine surgeons. The sensitivity and specificity of recognizing abnormal and normal roentgenograms using normal and abnormal SF-36 data was low because of the subjective nature of the SF-36 survey. This study additionally concluded that any surgical decision should not be taken on the basis of any roentgenographic pathology or on what the patient says in the SF-36 questionnaire, but on the basis of matched SF-36 scores, roentgenographic and imaging evaluation, and physical examination data.