• Yannick Tousignant-Laflamme, Claudia Laroche, Christine Beaulieu, Ann-Julie Bouchard, Sabrina Boucher, and Mélanie Michaud-Létourneau.
• a Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences , Université de Sherbrooke , Sherbrooke , QC , Canada.
• Physiother Theory Pract. 2017 May 1; 33 (5): 361-369.

BackgroundAcupuncture-like TENS (AL-TENS) has been shown to produce prolonged pain relief, but no study has yet investigated its duration on a population suffering from chronic low back pain (CLPB).ObjectiveOur objective was to quantify the duration and magnitude of analgesia induced by a 15- or 30-minute application of AL-TENS.MethodologyWe recruited a sample of 11 participants presenting with CLBP and conducted a randomized, crossover study, where participants were given AL-TENS for 15 and 30 minutes on two separate occasions. The pain intensity of their CLBP was assessed with a visual analogue scale before, during, and after AL-TENS applications. Magnitude and duration of analgesia were determined for each subject and for both AL-TENS application times.ResultsThe AL-TENS applications induced a clinically and statistically significant (p = 0.003) analgesia in all participants. Median duration of analgesia was 9 hours and 10 hours 30 minutes following the 15- and 30-minute AL-TENS applications, respectively; this 1.5-hour difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.55). Furthermore, we observed no significant difference in the magnitude of analgesia between both applications of AL-TENS (p > 0.56), suggesting that the duration of application of AL-TENS does not influence the magnitude of analgesia.ConclusionOur results suggest that clinicians could use a 15-minute AL-TENS application to provide significant analgesia in patients presenting with low back pain since if provides a comparable analgesia versus a 30-minute application.

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