How is recovery defined and measured in patients with low back pain? A mixed study systematic review
Patients with low back pain have often reported the recovery is an important concept to them. However, it is still not clear how recovery should be defined or measured. This systematic review is trying to better understand how recovery has been defined in measured with patients with low back pain and if the perspectives of patients has been included.
Status: Protocol published, search being updated to 2022
There has been a push for standardisation of outcomes and their measurement within health care. For patients with low back pain, there remains no unified understanding of how recovery should be defined and measured. Seminal work was conducted in this area over ten years ago, but previous systematic reviews have omitted surgical literature as well as qualitative literature. This highlights a gap in the literature, as many patients with low back pain may go on to receive surgical intervention to address their conditions. However, before recommendations can be made for recovery definition and measurement, literature searches must be updated to better understand this construct. A mixed study systematic review would be well positioned to search many different types of research to better understand how recovery has been defined and measured in patients with low back pain as a result.
CANSpine Researchers
Michael Lukacs, Katie Kowalski, Nicole Peters, David Walton, Alison Rushton
Collaborators
Masakazu Minetama, Keerthana Jayaprakash, Megan Stanley
Purpose
The purpose of this mixed study systematic review across both quantitative and qualitative research was to:
- Explore how recovery has been defined and measured for patients experiencing LBP, and
- Examine how the perspectives of patients and providers for recovery of LBP align or differ.
Findings/Results
Despite having reviewed over 400 studies (many of which were of low to moderate quality), recovery continues to lack consensus for its definition and measurement in patients with low back pain. More than 1/3 of included studies did not formally define recovery and also used multiple different types of measures to evaluate it. For most included studies (66%), the patient’s perspective regarding recovery was either not preserved in making a recovery determination or was made from the provider’s perspective alone.
Impact
This work is intended to calibrate the landscape to better understand how recovery has been defined and measured (e.g., there is no MESH term for recovery). Having scoured both quantitative and qualitative literature for definitions and measurements of recovery, subsequent work to generate consensus will be possible. In turn, this could lead to the creation of outcome measures that better capture recovery in a way that is important to patients.
Key Publications
Lukacs, M. J., Kowalski, K. L., Peters, N., Stanley, M., & Rushton, A. B. (2022). How is recovery defined and measured in patients with low back pain? Protocol for a mixed study systematic review. BMJ open, 12(5), e061475.
