Low back and radicular pain recently became a major public health problem. Medical expenses in general, and surgical procedures associated with overall care for the lower back pain are high and growing. Furthermore, these two chronic pain conditions are also leading causes for missed workdays. Degenerative changes of the intervertebral disc, facet joints, sacroiliac joint or disc herniation as ...

Although lumbar instability is considered to be responsible for the majority of chronic or recurrent backaches, the word ‘instability’ is still poorly defined. A number of different definitions exist, but as yet there are no clear and validated clinical features by which instability might be diagnosed. It is also not clear how instability as such might set up pain and disability. It is generall...

BACKGROUND A 2-year review of literature from October 2004 to December 2006 was completed to update current scientific evidence on diagnostic utility of facet joint injections. Diagnostic injections are employed to diagnose facet joint pain because available techniques cannot identify the pain generating structure in patients with chronic spinal pain. There is no physical examination technique,...

PURPOSE We compared signal change on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with fat suppression and bone scan activity of lumbar facet joints to determine if these two imaging findings are correlated. METHODS We retrospectively identified all patients who underwent imaging of the lumbar spine for pain evaluation using both technetium-99m methylene disphosphonate single-photon emission computed tom...

abstract   background: sacroiliac joint (sij) dysfunction is a widely known but poorly defined   cause of low back pain. to our knowledge, few published studies have been   conducted to evaluate systematically the prevalence and significance of concomitant   sacroiliac joint dysfunction in patients with herniated lumbar discs. as concomitant   sij dysfunction in low back pain patients is likely...

abstract   background: sacroiliac joint (sij) dysfunction is a widely known but poorly defined cause of low back pain. to our knowledge, few published studies have been conducted to evaluate systematically the prevalence and significance of concomitant sacroiliac joint dysfunction in patients with herniated lumbar discs. as concomitant sij dysfunction in low back pain patients is likely to resp...

Disorders of lumbosacral (LS) facet joints are manifested by low back pain with or without referred leg pain and decreased mobility of the LS spine (LS facet syndrome). The most frequent causes of LS facet syndrome are functional disorders (functional blockade or dysfunction of facet joint=reversible restriction of facet joint movements caused by meniscoid entrapment) and degenerative changes o...

This study describes a 3D-CT method for analyzing facet joint motion and vertebral rotation in the lumbar spine after TDR. Ten patients were examined before and then three years after surgery, each time with two CT scans: provoked flexion and provoked extension. After 3D registration, the facet joint 3D translation and segmental vertebral 3D rotation were analyzed at the operated level (L5-S1) ...

Clinical, epidemiological, and biomechanical studies suggest involvement of cervical facet joint injuries in neck pain. While bony motions can cause injurious tensile facet joint loading, it remains speculative whether such injuries initiate pain. There is currently a paucity of data explicitly investigating the relationship between facet mechanics and pain physiology. A rodent model of tensile...