Exercise or advice for sub-acute low back pain?

Funded Activity Summary

Low back pain (LBP) is highly prevalent and enormously expensive to society: total payments made by Workcover for injuries to the low back were in excess of $530 million in NSW in 1996. Chronic LBP (pain lasting more than 3 months) accounts for up to 90% of these costs. Prevention of a large part of this costly problem could be achieved by effective treatment at the earlier sub-acute phase of LBP (6 weeks to 3 months duration). Exercise and advice are two widely-used treatments for sub-acute LBP, yet remarkably, their efficacy is unknown. For the first time, this study will rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of both a supervised exercise program and advice to return to normal activity for sub-acute LBP. When this study is completed, Australian practitioners will be able to adopt evidence based practice when managing sub-acute LBP. In addition, the study's results will enable practitioners to select the most effective treatment for each individual patient. The results of this study should lead to a large reduction in the incidence of chronic LBP, therefore the results should lead to significant savings in terms of social and economic costs.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2000

End Date: 01-01-2002

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $234,601.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Rehabilitation And Therapy: Occupational And Physical

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

advice for back pain | cognitive behavioural therapy | lumbar spine injury | non-specific low back pain | physiotherapy | randomised controlled trial | sub-acute low back pain | supervised exercise for back pain

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