Treatment of Low Back Pain with a Digital Multidisciplinary Pain Treatment App: Short-Term Results.
Stephan Huber, Janosch A Priebe, Kaja-Maria Baumann and 3 others
PMID 29203460WHAT IT FOUND
People using an app combining education, physiotherapy and mindfulness for low back pain reported lower pain at last use than baseline.
Without a control group and with high dropout, this cannot prove the app caused improvement.
Key findings
01The main analysis found a significant reduction in user-reported pain from mean 4.80 at baseline to mean 3.75 on the last day of use.
02Only 32 of 180 users were still in the program at 12 weeks.
03The 20 users who completed 12 weeks reported mean pain 2.60 after 12 weeks and 4.60 at baseline.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
The study had no control group, so spontaneous improvement, the natural course of back pain, or other treatments could explain the lower pain reports. Many users stopped using the app before the end of the program, and the reasons for dropout were not known. Users were preselected app subscribers who reported sufficient fitness and no red flags, so they may not represent typical patients with persistent low back pain. The app delivered education, physiotherapy exercises and mindfulness together, so the contribution of any single component cannot be separated. The authors described the work as a first pilot study and called for prospective trials to confirm the effects.
Declared interests
One author has an advisory contract with Kaia Health Software, the company that made the app. The study used anonymized data from the company's user database.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that the app itself caused the pain reduction. The study had no control group, many users dropped out, and the app delivered education, physiotherapy and mindfulness together, so the effect of any single component cannot be separated.