Reporting on Work-Related Low Back Pain: Data Sources, Discrepancies and The Art of Discovering Truths

Fan, Xiangning; Straube, Sebastian

doi:10.2217/pmt.16.8

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(35 reference statements)

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“…The recommendations also included various standardized instruments for evaluating pain and impact on overall quality of life. Further, a recent review suggested that core outcomes in OA trials should include time off work (sick leave), employment status, work productivity and work interference [ 31 ]. Although most of the included articles in the present review measured either one or more of the above work-related outcomes, the reporting of a particular outcome was inconsistent between the studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in osteoarthritis – are they adequately reported in journal publications? A systematic review

Sowah

Balat

Straube

2018

J Occup Med Toxicol

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BackgroundOsteoarthritis (OA) has a high prevalence in Western societies and can affect an individual’s life in a number of domains, including work. In our experience, treatment trials on OA, however, rarely report work-related outcomes. Here we conducted a systematic review to assess the reporting of work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in OA. Our systematic review also compared two search strategies for identifying eligible publications, one where work-related terms were included in the database search string (A) and one where this was not the case and work-related outcomes were identified by searches of full text Portable Document Formats (PDFs) (B). Search strategy A would conventionally be used and would only identify publications where work-related terms were mentioned in the title or abstract. Search strategy B presents the innovation of full text PDF searching and would identify publications were work-related terms were reported in the full text, regardless of whether they are mentioned in the title and abstract or not. We hypothesize that search strategy B identifies more relevant publications than search strategy A.MethodsElectronic database searching was performed in Medline (Pubmed) from database inception to February 23, 2017 to identify peer-reviewed articles of randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled treatment trials in OA of the hand, hip, or knee, available as full-text PDFs. For search strategy A, search terms to identify work-related outcomes were included in the database search string, while search strategy B did not have these terms included in the database search string, but instead involved full text PDF searching. We included English language articles only and only those articles where searchable PDFs were available, to enable a comparison between search strategies A and B. Additionally, included studies also needed to report on pain intensity in relation to the work-related outcomes.ResultsSearch strategy A yielded 50 hits combined for hand, hip or knee OA that mentioned some work-related concept in the title or abstract; 12 articles had to be excluded because they were not available as searchable PDFs. Screening of the remaining 38 articles resulted in only two articles that satisfied our inclusion criteria. Search strategy B yielded 986 hits, out of which 201 articles were excluded because searchable full text PDFs were not available. PDF full text searching and further screening resulted in 10 articles that were considered eligible for our review.ConclusionsWork-related outcomes are rarely reported in journal publication on randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials of hand, hip or knee OA. Searching full text PDFs yields more eligible articles than searching titles and abstracts only.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in osteoarthritis – are they adequately reported in journal publications? A systematic review

Sowah

Balat

Straube

2018

J Occup Med Toxicol

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Back pain is one of the most common chronic disorders, which not only can reduce work productivity and negatively affect the quality of life [ 12 ], but can also increase the economic and societal burden [ 13 ]. Furthermore, it is reported that individuals with chronic back pain are worried about losing their jobs and they tend to continue to work without disclosure of pain to their employers [ 14 ].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Study of the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Experience of Back Pain Reported on Twitter® in the United States: A Natural Language Processing Approach

Fiok

Karwowski

Gutiérrez

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lifestyles, habits, and daily routine. Some of the impacts of COVID-19 have been widely reported already. However, many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still to be discovered. The main objective of this study was to assess the changes in the frequency of reported physical back pain complaints reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to other published studies, we target the general population using Twitter as a data source. Specifically, we aim to investigate differences in the number of back pain complaints between the pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. A total of 53,234 and 78,559 tweets were analyzed for November 2019 and November 2020, respectively. Because Twitter users do not always complain explicitly when they tweet about the experience of back pain, we have designed an intelligent filter based on natural language processing (NLP) to automatically classify the examined tweets into the back pain complaining class and other tweets. Analysis of filtered tweets indicated an 84% increase in the back pain complaints reported in November 2020 compared to November 2019. These results might indicate significant changes in lifestyle during the COVID-19 pandemic, including restrictions in daily body movements and reduced exposure to routine physical exercise.

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“…Non-specific low back pain (LBP) is a common worldwide disorder with a significant impact on productivity, work ability, and quality of life [ 1 ]. Indeed, LBP is characterized by persisting pain, muscle weakness, reduction of physical activity [ 2 ], and sleep disorders, which have serious consequences on a person’s quality of life by limiting daily life and work activities [ 3 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Workplace Interventions on Low Back Pain in Workers: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Russo

Papalia

Vadalà

et al. 2021

IJERPH

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This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to analyze the effects of workplace interventions (WI) on clinical outcomes related to low back pain (LBP) in a worker population, and to assess socio-economic parameters as participants on sick leave, days of sick leave, and return to work following WI. A systematic literature search was performed to select randomized clinical trials that investigated the effectiveness of WI on return to work, sick leave, and working capacity of workers affected by nonspecific LBP. Fourteen articles were included in the review and meta-analysis. The meta-analysis showed improvements in pain (p = 0.004), disability (p = 0.0008), fear-avoidance for psychical activity (p = 0.004), and quality of life (p = 0.001 for physical scale and p = 0.03 for mental scale) for patients who underwent WI compared to controls. Moreover, the pain reduction following WI was statistically significant in the healthcare workers’ group (p = 0.005), but not in the other workers’ group. The participants on sick leave and the number of days of sick leave decreased in the WI group without statistical significance (p = 0.85 and p = 0.10, respectively). Finally, LBP recurrence was significantly reduced in the WI group (p = 0.006). WI led to a significant improvement of clinical outcomes in a workers’ population affected by LBP.

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Reporting on Work-Related Low Back Pain: Data Sources, Discrepancies and The Art of Discovering Truths

Cited by 12 publications

References 42 publications

Work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in osteoarthritis – are they adequately reported in journal publications? A systematic review

Work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in osteoarthritis – are they adequately reported in journal publications? A systematic review

A Study of the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Experience of Back Pain Reported on Twitter® in the United States: A Natural Language Processing Approach

The Effects of Workplace Interventions on Low Back Pain in Workers: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

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