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- Issue 81
- Prospective back pain trajectories or retrospective…
Prospective back pain trajectories or retrospective recall - which tells us most about the patient?
Key Points
- Listen to your patients. They are the only real source of information regarding the specific course of their back pain.
BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE
The differing likely trajectory of back pain is vital information to help both understand the condition and then also to develop treatment strategies. These trajectories can be matched with other variables such as comorbidity, psychological status and activity limitations. This helps form subgroups that can be better understood. Chen et al studied back pain trajectories and associated factors in 2018 (1). They identified several predictors involved in severity of back pain from length of pain to the level of pain self-efficacy.
One way to do this is through visual trajectories that the patients can identify that retrospectively represent the trajectory of their back pain. Another method is to collect repeated measures via text message over 52 weeks and then use this to predict clinical status.
This study aimed to compare which method of identifying trajectory, prospective data or retrospective data, when matched with clinical outcome data, best represented the clinical status of patients with back pain.
The course of someone’s back pain is quite an individual thing, therefore, trying to classify or predict the trajectory of someone’s back pain appears to be a tough proposition.
METHODS
- This study used an exploratory longitudinal cohort design. It utilized the chiropractic low back pain cohort (ChiCo) dataset, this consisted of 2,848 participants. 1,623 were contacted and 1,378 participants accepted the invite to be contacted about SMS data.