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The manual therapy programme used in this study decreased sick leave and increased return to work more than the standardized optimized activating care only up to 10 weeks but not up to two years.

Background: Pain drawings are widely used as an assessment of patients' subjective pain in low back pain patients being considered for surgery. Less work has been done on primary health care patients. Moreover, the possible correlation between pain drawing modalities and other pain assessment methods, such as pain score and functional variables needs to be described. Thus, the objectives were to describe the course of pain drawings during treatment in primary health care for low back pain patients.

The effects on health-related quality of life were greater the larger the number of treatment modalities available. The 'stay active' treatment group, with the most restricted number of modalities, had the most modest health-related quality of life improvement, while group 4 with the most generous choice of treatment modalities, had the greatest improvement.

ObjectivesGlobal self-rated health (SRH) has become extensively used as an outcome measure in population health surveillance. The aim of this study was to analyse the effects of age and secular trend (year of investigation) on SRH.DesignProspective cohort study, using population-based data from eight ongoing cohort studies, with sampling performed between 1973 and 2003.SettingSweden.Participants11 880 women and men, aged 25–99 years, providing 14 470 observations.Primary outcome measureGlobal SRH.ResultsIn multiple ordinal logistic regression analyses, adjusted for the effects of covariates, there were independent effects of age (p<0.0001) and of year of investigation (p<0.0001) on SRH. In women the association was linear, showing lower levels of SRH with increased age, and more recent year of investigation. In men the association was curvilinear, and thus more complex. The final model explained 76.2% of the SRH variance in women and 74.5% of the variance in men.ConclusionsSRH was strongly and inversely associated with age in both sexes, after adjustment for other outcome-affecting variables. There was a strongly significant effect of year of investigation indicating a change in SRH, in women towards lower levels over calendar time, in men with fluctuations across time.