Effect of Low Back Pain Risk-Stratification Strategy on Patient Outcomes and Care Processes: the MATCH Randomized Trial in Primary Care.

Background: The STarT Back strategy for categorizing and treating patients with low back pain (LBP) improved patients' function while reducing costs in England.

Objective: This trial evaluated the effect of implementing an adaptation of this approach in a US setting.

Design: The Matching Appropriate Treatments to Consumer Healthcare needs (MATCH) trial was a pragmatic cluster randomized trial with a pre-intervention baseline period.

Evaluation of a risk-stratification strategy to improve primary care for low back pain: the MATCH cluster randomized trial protocol.

Background: Despite numerous options for treating back pain and the increasing healthcare resources devoted to this problem, the prevalence and impact of back pain-related disability has not improved. It is now recognized that psychosocial factors, as well as physical factors, are important predictors of poor outcomes for back pain. A promising new approach that matches treatments to the physical and psychosocial obstacles to recovery, the STarT Back risk stratification approach, improved patients' physical function while reducing costs of care in the United Kingdom (UK).

Risk factors for ethambutol optic toxicity.

Context: Optic neuropathy is a well-known complication of ethambutol therapy and usually manifests as a decrease in visual acuity, cecocentral scotomas, and deficits in color vision.

Objective: To support or disprove the hypothesis that a significant majority of patients who develop ocular toxicity while undergoing treatment for a mycobacterium infection do so after experiencing either a prolonged course or unusually high serum levels of ethambutol.

Design: Retrospective chart review (16 cases) and literature meta-analysis (54 cases).