Chronic low back pain: exploring trends and potential predictors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: Hundreds of thousands of Quebec residents suffer from chronic pain, for which treatment is far from optimal. Despite low back pain being the second most common reason to visit a primary care physician, management remains challenging. Additionally, chronic low back pain (CLBP) has been found to be the most common reason for patients to be referred to tertiary pain centers. Recently, there has been an increasing acceptance that bio-psycho-social factors play a crucial role the clinical course of CLBP. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to identify subgroups of CLBP patients treated in tertiary care, as defined by their changes in pain and disability over time, and to explore possible characteristics associated with these changes. Specific objectives were: 1) to establish whether there are distinct subgroups of patients with CLBP with different characteristics associated with change in pain and disability at 6, 12, and 24 months following an initial visit in a tertiary pain clinic; and 2) to identify potential social, psychological, biological, and environmental factors that may predict their responses in pain intensity and disability in accordance with the Revised Wilson and Cleary Model for Health-Related Quality of Life. Design: Observational prospective design to follow a cohort of patients who were enrolled in the web-based Quebec Pain Registry. Setting: The Quebec Pain Registry, a research database comprised of close to 5000 chronic pain patients. Eligible participants included all patients who 1) have been diagnosed with lumber without radicular pain, LBP (diagnostic code 3.1), lumbar & radicular pain, LRP (diagnostic code 3.2), or diffuse lumbar pain, DLP (diagnostic code 3.4), 2) who provided written consent for their data to be used for research purposes, and 3) have completed their initial visit to the pain clinic by May 31, 2011. Intervention: The data required for this project had previously been collected and entered in the Quebec Pain Registry. Basic descriptive results were produced using SAS® software 9.2. This analysis described the characteristics of the 917 patients included in the study at baseline. Additional data were explored to examine patterns of changes over two years for certain characteristics. A generalized estimating equations model (GEE) was used to analyze data at 6, 12, and 24 months after the initial visit. Results: 299 (32.6%) patients were diagnosed LBP, 522 (56.9%) with LRP, and 96 (10.4%) with DLP. In general, all patients were relatively comparable in terms of their characteristics with the exception of DLP, where proportions were noticeably different. Patients diagnosed with DLP had a higher pain duration median (6.0 years) and the most frequently current employment status was permanent disability (both in regards to proportions). The most common ethnicity was Caucasian among all diagnoses. Income was similarly distributed among all groups and secondary school was the highest level of education completed for all. The top three medical conditions reported other than CLBP were rheumatoid arthritis/osteoarthritis, hypertension, and depressive disorders. DLP patients reported "accident at work" as the most common circumstance surrounding their onset of pain. DLP also had noticeably different mean scores for average pain, worst pain, depression, catastrophizing, disability, mental and physical summary scores on the health-related quality of life questionnaire at baseline, 6, 12, and 24 months (in regards to proportions). Patients with higher worst pain scores, longer pain duration, and lower physical summary scores at the initial visit were significantly less likely to show improvements in pain intensity and disability at six and 12 months. Conclusions: Although modifying the analysis prohibited conclusions for a two-year follow to be made, characteristics, such as worst pain, pain duration, and lower physical summary scores at both six and 12 months were discovered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".