Blended-Learning Pain Neuroscience Education for People With Chronic Spinal Pain: Randomized Controlled Multicenter Trial
PainSci commentary on Malfliet 2018: ?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.
This is well-designed test of classic “back school” type education for spinal pain patients, versus more modern/trendy pain neuroscience education (PNE), a strategy popularized by Explain Pain. Just teaching people about their spines is well known not to work any miracles; hopefully PNE does better, and it did, but only modestly and only by some measures, namely fear of movement and the perception of illness. There was no noteworthy difference according to several other measures: disability, worrying, and pain awareness.
You could see these results as either promising or disappointing. Bear in mind that education is extremely hard to standardize, and success probably depends heavily on exactly how you teach people.
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.
BACKGROUND: Available evidence favors the use of pain neuroscience education (PNE) in patients with chronic pain. However, PNE trials are often limited to small sample sizes and, despite the current digital era, the effects of blended-learning PNE (ie, the combination of online digital media with traditional educational methods) have not yet been investigated.
OBJECTIVE: The study objective was to examine whether blended-learning PNE is able to improve disability, catastrophizing, kinesiophobia, and illness perceptions.
DESIGN: This study was a 2-center, triple-blind randomized controlled trial (participants, statistician, and outcome assessor were masked).
SETTING: The study took place at university hospitals in Ghent and Brussels, Belgium.
PARTICIPANTS: Participants were 120 people with nonspecific chronic spinal pain (ie, chronic neck pain and low back pain).
INTERVENTION: The intervention was 3 sessions of PNE or biomedically focused back/neck school education (addressing spinal anatomy and physiology).
MEASUREMENTS: Measurements were self-report questionnaires (Pain Disability Index, Pain Catastrophizing Scale, Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia, Illness Perception Questionnaire, and Pain Vigilance and Awareness Questionnaire).
RESULTS: None of the treatment groups showed a significant change in the perceived disability (Pain Disability Index) due to pain (mean group difference posteducation: 1.84; 95% CI = -2.80 to 6.47). Significant interaction effects were seen for kinesiophobia and several subscales of the Illness Perception Questionnaire, including negative consequences, cyclical time line, and acute/chronic time line. In-depth analysis revealed that only in the PNE group were these outcomes significantly improved (9% to 17% improvement; 0.37 ≤ Cohen d ≥ 0.86).
LIMITATIONS: Effect sizes are small to moderate, which might raise the concern of limited clinical utility; however, changes in kinesiophobia exceed the minimal detectable difference. PNE should not be used as the sole treatment modality but should be combined with other treatment strategies.
CONCLUSIONS: Blended-learning PNE was able to improve kinesiophobia and illness perceptions in participants with chronic spinal pain. As effect sizes remained small to medium, PNE should not be used as a sole treatment but rather should be used as a key element within a comprehensive active rehabilitation program. Future studies should compare the effects of blended-learning PNE with offline PNE and should consider cost-effectiveness.
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:
- Inciting events associated with lumbar disc herniation. Suri 2010 Spine J.
- Prediction of an extruded fragment in lumbar disc patients from clinical presentations. Pople 1994 Spine (Phila Pa 1976).
- Characteristics of patients with low back and leg pain seeking treatment in primary care: baseline results from the ATLAS cohort study. Konstantinou 2015 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision in reducing risk of mental health problems and promoting well-being in adolescence: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial. Kuyken 2022 Evid Based Ment Health.
- No long-term effects after a three-week open-label placebo treatment for chronic low back pain: a three-year follow-up of a randomized controlled trial. Kleine-Borgmann 2022 Pain.