• Spine · Aug 2005

    Comparative Study

    Prognostic factors for low back pain in patients referred for physiotherapy: comparing outcomes and varying modeling techniques.

    • Geertruida E Bekkering, Henricus J M Hendriks, Maurits W van Tulder, Dirk L Knol, Maureen J Simmonds, Rob A B Oostendorp, and Lex M Bouter.
    • Dutch Institute of Allied Health Care, Amersfoort, The Netherlands.
    • Spine. 2005 Aug 15; 30 (16): 1881-6.

    Study DesignData were derived from a randomized controlled trial on the (cost-) effectiveness of the implementation of the clinical guidelines on physiotherapy for low back pain in primary care.ObjectivesTo describe the course of low back pain in patients who are referred to physiotherapy, to identify clinically important prognostic factors on different outcomes, and to evaluate the influence of different statistical techniques in developing a prognostic model.Summary Of Background DataSeveral studies have aimed to identify prognostic factors for low back pain in primary care. These studies focused on different outcome measures and used various statistical techniques.MethodsPrimary outcomes were perceived recovery, improvement in pain, improvement in functioning, and presence of disabling low back pain at 3 and 12 months follow-up. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed for each outcome variable. Two cut-off points were used to determine significance with respect to the univariate analysis, and two selection methods were used to build the final multivariate models. The resulting prognostic models were compared.ResultsA total of 500 patients were included. Pain and disability reduced considerably in the first 3 months, but further reduction was only modest. Prognostic factors varied for different outcomes, but the duration of the current episode was included in all models generated. Varying the statistical techniques also resulted in a different prognostic model with some change to the amount of variance explained.ConclusionsA substantial proportion of patients still experienced some pain and disability at 12 months follow-up. The most stable predictor of prognosis in low back pain was the duration of the current episode. The choice of statistical method influenced the final model; however, changes in the explained variance were small.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,694,794 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.