Are the back pain guidelines wrong?

Funding Activity

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Funded Activity Summary

All current clinical practice guidelines for the management of acute low back pain (LBP) agree that acute LBP has an excellent prognosis with most cases recovering within 4-6 weeks. However, the information on prognosis is contradictory and in fact chronic low back pain could develop in as many as 56% of those with acute low back pain. There is also agreement among the guidelines that the rare cases of serious disease (eg cancer) can be detected with a routine clinical examination but no study has evaluated the accuracy of the complete clinical assessment, and there is only limited evidence on components of the clinical assessment. We will therefore investigate the 1 year prognosis of LBP and the accuracy of the clinical assessment for detecting serious disease in the back pain population. Our study will provide the first reliable estimates of prognosis of acute LBP and the accuracy of widely recommended clinical assessment procedures and thereby allow appropriate allocation of funds to this enormous problem.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2003

End Date: 01-01-2005

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $448,300.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Primary Health Care

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

diagnosis | low back pain | primary health care | prognosis