Efficacy of intradermal administration of diclofenac for the treatment of nonspecific chronic low back pain: results from a retrospective observational study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Intradermal administration of analgesic drugs with mesotherapy is effective for the local treatment of musculoskeletal pain. Few studies analyzed the effects of different drugs administrated with this technique. AIM: The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of diclofenac versus lysine acetylsalicylate-based mesotherapy in relieving pain (primary outcome), and disability (secondary outcome) in patients with nonspecific chronic low back pain. DESIGN: Retrospective observational study. SETTING: Outpatient rehabilitation medicine center. POPULATION: Records of 101 patients with nonspecific chronic low back pain. METHODS: Data were extracted from the outpatients records of patients affected by nonspecific chronic low back pain since 12 weeks before, treated with 5 sessions of mesotherapy with diclofenac mixtures (group A) or aspirin-lysine acetylsalicylate mixture (group B). Assessments recorded were taken before the first treatment (T0), at the end of the 5-week treatment (T1), and at 4 (T2) and 12 weeks (T3) of follow-up after the last treatment, using a pain visual analogue scale (VAS) primary outcome, Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) secondary outcome, and the Short-Form McGill Pain Questionnaire (SF-MPQ) Comparisons within and between groups were performed using the t-test, the χ2 test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, as appropriate. RESULTS: Records from 101 patients consecutively were analyzed, 51 in group A (mean age and standard deviation [SD]=62.8±10.7; F/M=33/18) and 50 in group B (mean age±SD=64.1±15.8; F/M=30/20). At baseline VAS, SF-MPQ, ODI scores were respectively 7.6±1.3, 22.49±9.96, 44.80±15.55 (mean and SD) in group A; VAS, SF-MPQ, ODI scores were respectively 6.7±1.6, 18.66±9.65, 39.04±16.06 (mean and SD) in group B. Mean differences between group A and group B in the changes of scores from baseline (T0) to end of study (T3) were -1.3 (VAS), -5.81 (SF-MPQ) and -17.05 (ODI). Mesotherapy induced significant reductions in pain severity and disability in both groups with better results in diclofenac-based treatment. CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective pilot study suggests the efficacy and safety of diclofenac mesotherapy for relieving pain and disability in patients affected by chronic nonspecific low back pain in a convenient sample but further studies will confirm these results. CLINICAL REHABILITATION IMPACT: Diclofenac mesotherapy appears to be a viable treatment. to reduce pain and improve function in patients affected by chronic moderate-to-severe nonspecific low back pain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".