Trial Design and Endpoint Evaluation in Clinical Studies Addressing Chronic Back Pain

A review of the literature evaluating clinical trials of chronic back pain.

To assist physicians in assessing the quality of clinical trial data to make the most informed treatment decisions.

Chronic pain is a tremendous public health issue, affecting close to 100 million adults in the United States, and costs the American people billions of dollars. One traditional treatment approach, the long-term use of opiate medications, has recently come under intense scrutiny for problems with complications, diversion, abuse, addiction, and lack of efficacy. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recognized that overprescribing opiates has enabled an overdose crisis, and written guidelines that are intended to limit their use. It is for this reason that physicians must have a comprehensive understanding of the range of drug-free alternative therapies available and have the tools needed to rigorously evaluate the chronic pain literature so they can make appropriate treatment decisions.

An evaluation of how clinical trials are designed and ranked, outcome measures, and costs for a variety of therapies is necessary to determine which treatment option is the most efficacious for an individual patient.

Clinical trial data demonstrate that spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is a safe and effective treatment option for many types of chronic pain, including back pain. The last 10 years has brought tremendous advances in the field of neuromodulation. Today, several treatment modalities exist for SCS requiring the physician to be able to critically evaluate and interpret the literature and determine which modality has the strongest evidence. When evaluating clinical trial data of patients with chronic back pain, emphasis must be placed on well designed, randomized controlled trials with long-term follow-up producing level I evidence. These data are obtained in a rigorous manner and are likely to have less bias when compared with lower level studies.

The level I studies performed to date have provided evidence that treatment with SCS results in sustainable pain reduction and improvements in scores measuring quality of life and patient functioning in those patients with chronic intractable back pain.

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