Predictors of self-management in patients with chronic low back pain: a longitudinal study
Full reference: Banerjee, A., Hendrick, P. & Blake, H. Predictors of self-management in patients with chronic low back pain: a longitudinal study. BMC Musculoskelet Disord 23, 1071 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-022-05933-2
Low back pain (LBP) is a condition that affects a large proportion of the population and is one of the main reasons for people to visit their GP and take time off work. For some people LBP can be long lasting and the focus for management is help people to better self-manage their LBP to enable them to be able to confidently cope with their symptoms and manage their condition. Being able to self-manage the symptoms of LBP is very important as it can impact on a person’s ability to work and undertake the activities they enjoy.
However, we are unsure why some patients find self- managing their LBP difficult. Therefore we designed a study to find out what factors could predict whether patients with long lasting LBP are able to effectively self-manage their LBP. The aims were to try and find out if there are certain factors which help patients to self-manage their LBP and also if there are factors that could be barriers for people to being able to self-manage their LBP
In this study, we invited 270 working-age patients with long lasting low back pain who had attended outpatient physiotherapy for management of their LBP. Participants completed a range of questionnaires to measure a number of factors including pain levels, physical activity levels, fear of movement due to pain, and beliefs of how harmful their pain is, depression levels and also measures of their ability to self-manage their LBP. The patients completed these questionnaires at the beginning of the study and then again at 6-months.
Our results found that those patients who engaged in physical activity and also attended healthcare visits were better able to self-manage their LBP. A number of factors were found to be barriers to self-managing LPB. Patients with higher levels of depression, fear of moving due to their pain and believing that their LBP is harmful were less able to self-manage their LBP. These results will be helpful for clinicians and patients to better understand why some patients find it difficult to self-manage their LBP and also to improve target management for these patients.