Do you have mechanical low back pain or inflammatory low back pain? Do you know the difference? Have you put up with it for years and done nothing about it or has your GP just prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and you have not been back since?
If you have with inflammatory low back pain (IBP) you will usually experience severe lower back pain, which is worse at night, not helped by rest and which is interfering with your mental health, your ability to work and also your general quality of life.
It has been found that early diagnosis of IBP is the key to reducing the risk of you becoming severely disabled such that you can’t move around properly and also reduces the likelihood of needing to retire early.
Back pain is one of the most common medical complaints and it has been estimated to affect as many as 17.3 million people in the UK. Fortunately, most cases are due to a mechanical rather than an inflammatory cause so your back pain is not likely to be inflammatory, but we will always bear this in mind before we start treating you, when you come in to see us.
When you visit the Avenue Clinic with low back pain, your symptoms will be discussed at length so that we can find out the pattern of your clinical symptoms and signs. If we suspect that you might have IBP then you will be referred to your GP as you need blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify the cause of your IBP. Early diagnosis has become all the more important because biological therapies are now available that effectively suppress disease activity and improve functional ability in patients that have not responded to conventional drug therapy.
A previous UK study showed an average delay in diagnosis of more than eight years, with almost one-third of diagnosed patients not referred to a rheumatologist. This is partly due to a failure of individuals with IBP symptoms to present to their GP, and partly to a failure of GPs to recognise those patients with chronic back pain that have an inflammatory rather than a mechanical cause.
“Patients with inflammatory back pain (IBP) can wait years for a correct diagnosis. Early treatment is critical in achieving better outcomes for these patients. We applied a novel recruitment method using Facebook over five months to identify adults in the community with symptoms suggestive of IBP, comparing the outcome with other forms of recruitment, principally newspaper advertising,” said Dr Arumugam Moorthy of the Department of Rheumatology, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, UK. “Facebook advertising recruited a younger group of respondents and a higher proportion of them fulfilled the criteria for a diagnosis of IBP compared to the group of patients recruited by other methods,” Dr Moorthy explained.
If you are worried about the cause of your persistent low back pain, come to see us now and if we suspect IBP, we will write to your GP and make sure you are properly investigated. Please don’t ‘just leave’ any symptoms … the earlier we see you, the better.