BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Clinicians treating patients with low back pain often use exercise to reduce pain and improve function. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of trunk extensor endurance training in reducing pain and decreasing disability in subjects with subacute low back pain (ie, onset of back pain within 7 days to 7 weeks). SUBJECTS AND METHODS Patients were random...

OBJECTIVE The Neck Disability Index, the Northwick Park Pain Questionnaire, the Copenhagen Neck Functional Disability Scale and the Neck Pain and Disability Scale are widely used scales for assessing neck pain or disability. The aim of this study was to determine the most suitable scale for Turkish patients with neck pain. METHODS All scales were translated into Turkish, administered to 102 p...

BACKGROUND The choice of an evaluative instrument has been hampered by the lack of head-to-head comparisons of responsiveness and the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) in subpopulations of low back pain (LBP). The objective of this study was to concurrently compare responsiveness and MCID for commonly used pain scales and functional instruments in four subpopulations of LBP patient...

OBJECTIVES Tofacitinib is an oral Janus kinase inhibitor for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Here we investigated the effects of tofacitinib on patient-reported outcomes (PRO) in patients with active RA. METHODS Two, 6-month, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2b studies were performed. The combination study evaluated patients with inadequate response to methotrexate who recei...

BACKGROUND Patient-Reported Expanded Disability Status Scale (PREDSS) tools are an attractive alternative to the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) during long term or geographically challenging studies, or in pressured clinical service environments. OBJECTIVES Because the studies reporting these tools have used different metrics to compare the PREDSS and EDSS, we undertook an individual...

Although functional outcome is frequently discussed and written about, it is often not clear what functional outcome is and how it can be measured. This paper introduces the concept of latent and observed measures of functional disability, and distinguishes between disability as a process measure and disability as an outcome measure. Using the Health Assessment Questionnaire as the main functio...

A disability is a restriction or lack of ability to perform an activity in a manner or within the range considered normal for a human being. It has never received adequate attention from society. Ignorance, lack of awareness and lack of knowledge make the invisible disability. Most of the authorities appointed the legislation are not fully functional. This study was to find out family awareness...

Intramuscularly administered elcatonin (ECT) reduces pain via the central nervous system. A prospective study was performed to determine whether ECT has a beneficial effect on back pain and function in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis during bisphosphonate therapy. Sixty-one postmenopausal osteoporotic women with back pain (mean age: 73.7 years, range: 54-96 years) were divided into two g...

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in illness perceptions in patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and the association of those changes with disability, and to determine the predictive value of illness perceptions in disability. METHODS Illness perceptions and disability were measured at baseline and after 6 years in 241 patients with OA at multiple sites (mean age 59.0 years, 82.2% women) using th...