There are evidence-based physical and psychological therapies for back pain ensuring access to these is essential.” Our findings further emphasise the urgent need to review funding arrangements for chronic pain care to help patients in their search for relief. “Low back pain is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. “Our review of the clinical data suggests no sustained benefits to the surgery outweigh the costs and risks. Our review found that the long-term benefits and harms are essentially unknown,” said lead researcher Dr Adrian Traeger from Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, an initiative of the University of Sydney, Sydney Local Health District and Northern Sydney Local Health District. “Spinal cord stimulation is invasive and has a great financial cost to people who choose surgery as a last resort to alleviate their pain. In Australia, the devices' long-term safety and performance are also being re- assessed by The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s regulatory authority for therapeutic goods. The taskforce is reviewing the eligibility of current prostheses subsidised by Medicare. The review findings have been submitted to the Federal Department of Health and Aged Care prosthesis list review taskforce. Harms from spinal cord stimulation could include nerve damage, infection, and the electrical leads moving, all of which may need repeated surgeries. The researchers also found that adverse side effects to the surgery were poorly documented overall, preventing them from concluding the level of risk involved. There was little to no clinical data regarding the long-term effectiveness of spinal cord stimulation. The review concluded that spinal cord stimulation is no better than a placebo for treating low back pain, with probably little to no benefit for people with low back pain or improvement in their quality of life. The researchers analysed the results of 13 clinical trials, looking at data from 699 participants, comparing spinal cord stimulation treatment with placebo or no treatment for low back pain.Ĭochrane reviews are trusted by researchers, medical professionals and policymakers because they use robust methodologies to combine evidence from multiple sources, reducing the impact of bias and random error that can make individual studies less reliable. This included randomised controlled trials, considered to be the most robust method to measure effectiveness of a treatment in medical research. The study reviewed published clinical data on spinal cord stimulation. Spinal cord stimulation is thought to work by implanting a device that sends electrical pulses to the spinal cord to interrupt nerve signals before they get to the brain. Spinal cord stimulation, a medical technology suggested to treat people with chronic back pain, does not provide long-term relief and may cause harm, according to a Cochrane Review released today.
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