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Title:  A CONSENSUS APPROACH TOWARDS THE STANDARDISATION OF LOW BACK PAIN DEFINITIONS FOR USE IN PREVALENCE STUDIES

Authors and affiliation: Clermont E. Dionne (Laval University, CANADA), Kate M. Dunn, Peter R. Croft (Keele University, UK)

Email address: clermont.dionne@uresp.ulaval.ca

Introduction: While conducting recently a systematic review on the prevalence of  back pain, we were stricken by the inconsistency in definitions of back pain used in the literature. This situation brings important limits to the comparison and synthesis of results.  It thus clearly appears that if investigators would use the same definition(s) of back pain in different studies, we would get much higher benefits from these efforts.

Objective: This workshop will constitute the fourth step of an ongoing study that aims at identifying a few, highly standardised definitions of low back pain, that could be consistently used by investigators to provide more comparable data, more specifically: 1) An “optimal” definition for use in focused studies where the investigators have the opportunity to ask detailed questions, and 2) A ”minimal” definition, for use in large population-based general surveys, where only one or two questions may be used.

Methods / content: 1-Establish a list of definitions of low back pain site, symptoms, exclusions, frequency, duration, severity and time frame from the literature; 2-Identify an international panel of back pain experts who agree to rate the proposed definitions as to their suitability for standard use; 3-Use the Delphi approach to summarise the ratings of the panel’s members and reduce the list of definitions; 4-Discuss/confirm/focus/ expand the final definitions in a workshop at the International Forum for Primary Care Research on Low Back Pain (Amsterdam 2006); 5-Publish a consensus statement on the definition of back pain.