Improving Rehabilitation Research to Optimize Care and Outcomes for People with Chronic Primary Low Back Pain: Methodological and Reporting Recommendations from a WHO Systematic Review Series.
Carol Cancelliere, Hainan Yu, Danielle Southerst, Gaelan Connell, Leslie Verville, André Bussières, Douglas P Gross, Paulo Pereira, Silvano Mior, Andrea C Tricco, Christine Cedraschi, Ginny Brunton, Margareta Nordin, Heather M Shearer, Jessica J Wong, Jill A Hayden, Rachel Ogilvie, Dan Wang, Pierre Côté, Cesar A Hincapié
PMID 37991649WHAT IT FOUND
A set of recommendations for how future trials and reviews of chronic low back pain rehabilitation should be run and written up.
It reports no patients and no treatment outcomes, so nothing here changes what you do on Monday.
What this paper is
This is a methods and reporting paper, not a study. It draws on four World Health Organization systematic reviews of rehabilitation for chronic low back pain to catalogue what those reviews found lacking in the trials they included: the intervention was described too vaguely to repeat in 14 of the 82 trials, only 12 of the 82 reported any harms, adherence was not reported in 54 of the 82, and 13 of 69 trials in three of the reviews compared treatment against doing nothing at all. From this the authors set out recommendations for how future trials and reviews should be designed, analysed and reported. There are no patients of their own and no treatment outcomes, so there is no finding here to act on.
Declared interests
The World Health Organization and the University of Zurich are named as funders of this work.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the numbers in this paper as evidence about which rehabilitation works for chronic low back pain. They describe how badly the trials behind four earlier reviews were run and reported, not how well any treatment performed. No treatment is tested here.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →