Short Race of Psychotherapy Lumbar Pain for Three Years

A short -term course of a type of psychotherapy was almost three times more effective in lower chronic low back pain than standard treatments, even years later.

Cognitive Functional Therapy (CFT) provides people with personalized programs that teach them to understand and deal with their pain through movement and lifestyle changes. By 2023, scientists found the revenue chronic low back pain for at least one year after only eight sessions.

Now, the researchers have found that these sessions continue to bring relief three years later – almost draws the improvement in pain and its related disability levels compared to the care that people are already on, such as painkillers, physiotherapy or therapeutic massage.

“It seems to produce a lasting difference in patients who are very disabled from back pain, many of whom were – for all practical goals – treatment resistant,” says Jan Hartvigsen at the University of Southern Denmark.

Back pain of all kinds is a leading cause of disability globally, with treatments that often only give mild, short -term relief. In the trial of 2023, Hartvigsen and his colleagues recruited 492 people with chronically lower back, defined as assessment of at least 4 in a pain scale of 0 to 10, and it had been moderate to limit their physical activity for three months or more.

The researchers had one -third of the participants continue with their typical care routine. The other two-thirds stopped their regular care to participate in seven CFT sessions over 12 weeks with a last session of 26 weeks.

During these sessions, physiotherapists examine extensive training on how to deliver this psychotherapy, each individual’s attitude, thoughts of pain, feelings and lifestyle factors. They love to help participants see their bread differently, take back their movement patterns and control strategies and adopt healthier diets, rest strategies, stress management and training plans.

“Many people with chronic pain become afraid of using their bodies,” says Hartvigsen. “They are not crazy, and it is not all in their heads. But their behavior, their faith and their nervous system have been so adapted and use for these bread behavior that they need someone who can form a strong therapeutic alliance with them.”

Half of the participants in the CFT group also had biofeedback, a sensor-based technique that allows them to track their movement patterns in real time to help reintroduce their attitude and movement.

In one year, both pain intensity and disability levels improved – measured by Roland Morris’s questionnaire for disability – about three to four times as much in the CFT groups compared to those receiving usual care. Biofeedback increased only a little power cycle of CFT.

In the new three-year follow-up, the Hartvigsen team prevented updated feedback from 312 of the participants, which were evenly distributed over the treatment groups.

They found that those who received CFT still had an almost triple improvement in both pain and disability compared to the usual care group. More, about three times as many people in the CFT groups, disability results had so low on the questionnaire that their pain was not long lasting that became functional.

But the participants that we all free to seek additional care after the first year that was not repeated.