New Approaches Show Promise in Helping People With Low-Back Pain
Millions of adults struggle for years with chronic low-back pain—a disabling ailment that has no easy fix. Common causes include injury, arthritis and degenerative changes in the spine. It tends to start at midlife with the natural wear and tear of aging.
But often there is no clearly identifiable physical cause, leaving patients to veer from one ineffective treatment to another—including highly addictive prescription opioids. Now, researchers are working on personalized treatment plans that can address physical, emotional and psychological traits in individual patients that influence the pain they are experiencing. Physical therapy, exercise, diet and lifestyle choices often play a role.
Some research is also looking at ways to retrain the brain to think differently about pain. To be sure, low-back pain can be a sign of something life-threatening, such as cancer, or a severe spine condition that requires surgery. As a result, chronic low-back pain needs to be fully evaluated.
But once “red flags" are eliminated, doctors need a more precise way to determine what will work for individual patients, says Dr. Matt Mauck, a researcher and pain-medicine physician at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s UNC Pain Management Center. UNC is part of the Back Pain Research Consortium, or Bacpac, funded by the National Institutes of Health as part of a broader effort to improve the understanding, treatment and management of pain and reduce opioid abuse and addiction.
In a study at multiple sites nationwide, researchers are testing the effectiveness of four nonsurgical treatments in connection with specific personal traits of patients. Each treatment has been shown to work, though not equally well for everyone. The four
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