Chronic neck pain and whiplash: A case-control study of the relationship between acute whiplash injuries and chronic neck pain
One page on PainSci cites Freeman 2006: The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks
PainSci commentary on Freeman 2006: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
About four hundred middle-aged people with neck pain were compared to cases of back pain, their cases described by several dozen chiropractor volunteers for the study. Of 94 chiropractors, only 33 actually got submitted correct and complete data properly, and even then there were some problematic failures to follow instructions — cat herding!
Overall, 37% of the subjects attributed their spinal pain — back or neck pain — to a motor vehicle accident, but there were large differences between the two groups. Neck pain followed car accidents much more than back pain: a whopping four times as many cases in men, and twice as many case in women.
Although simple enough, this data is quite rare, and there are no other similar studies as of 2020.
The authors concluded: “ … it is reasonable to infer that a significant proportion of individuals with chronic neck pain in the general population were originally injured in a motor vehicle accident.”
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
The authors undertook a case-control study of chronic neck pain and whiplash injuries in nine states in the United States to determine whether whiplash injuries contributed significantly to the population of individuals with chronic neck and other spine pain. Four hundred nineteen patients and 246 controls were randomly enrolled. Patients were defined as individuals with chronic neck pain, and controls as those with chronic back pain. The two groups were surveyed for cause of chronic pain as well as demographic information. The two groups were compared using an exposure-odds ratio. Forty-five per cent of the patients attributed their pain to a motor vehicle accident. An OR of 4.0 and 2.1 was calculated for men and women, respectively. Based on the results of the present study, it is reasonable to infer that a significant proportion of individuals with chronic neck pain in the general population were originally injured in a motor vehicle accident.
related content
- “The influence of psychosocial factors on recovery following acute whiplash trauma,” Carstensen, Danish Medical Journal, 2012.
- “Predictors of persistent neck pain after whiplash injury,” Atherton et al, Emerg Med J, 2006.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.