Disrupted Self-Perception in People With Chronic Low Back Pain. Further Evaluation of the Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire.

Unlabelled: Several lines of evidence suggest that body perception is altered in people with chronic back pain. Maladaptive perceptual awareness of the back might contribute to the pain experience as well as serve as a target for treatment. The Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire (FreBAQ) is a simple questionnaire recently developed to assess back-specific altered self-perception.

Moving in an environment of induced sensorimotor incongruence does not influence pain sensitivity in healthy volunteers: a randomised within-subject experiment.

Objectives: It has been proposed that in the same way that conflict between vestibular and visual inputs leads to motion sickness, conflict between motor commands and sensory information associated with these commands may contribute to some chronic pain states. Attempts to test this hypothesis by artificially inducing a state of sensorimotor incongruence and assessing self-reported pain have yielded equivocal results. To help clarify the effect sensorimotor incongruence has on pain we investigated the effect of moving in an environment of induced incongruence on pressure pain thresholds (PPT) and the pain experienced immediately on completion of PPT testing.

Assessing self-perception in patients with chronic low back pain: development of a back-specific body-perception questionnaire.

Background: There is considerable interest in the role that disturbance of body-perception may play in long standing pain problems such as chronic low back pain (CLBP), both as a contributor to the clinical condition and as a potential target for treatment. In some chronic pain conditions body-perception has been investigated using self-report questionnaires. There is currently no questionnaire for assessing body-perception in people with CLBP.

Illusory touch temporarily improves sensation in areas of chronic numbness: a brief communication.

Background: Creating the visual illusion of touch can improve tactile perception in healthy subjects.

Objective: We were interested in seeing if creating the illusion of touch in an insensate area could improve sensation in that area.

Methods: Fourteen people with chronic numbness participated in a randomized crossover experiment.

Lumbar tactile acuity is near identical between sides in healthy pain-free participants.

A growing body of literature suggests that alterations in brain structure and function are a feature of chronic back pain. Tactile acuity is considered a clinical signature of primary somatosensory representation and offers a simple measure of cortical reorganisation. Clinical interpretation of test scores from an individual patient is hampered by variance in published normative values and less than ideal inter-rater reliability.

Seeing it helps: movement-related back pain is reduced by visualization of the back during movement.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine whether visualization of the back influenced parameters of movement-related pain in people with chronic nonspecific low back pain.

Methods: We used a randomized cross-over experiment in which 25 participants performed repeated lumbar spine movements under 2 conditions. In the visual feedback condition, patients were able to visualize their back as it moved by the use of mirrors.

Cortical changes in chronic low back pain: current state of the art and implications for clinical practice.

There is increasing evidence that chronic pain problems are characterised by alterations in brain structure and function. Chronic back pain is no exception. There is a growing sentiment, with accompanying theory, that these brain changes contribute to chronic back pain, although empirical support is lacking.

Self-reported assessment of disability and performance-based assessment of disability are influenced by different patient characteristics in acute low back pain.

For an individual, the functional consequences of an episode of low back pain is a key measure of their clinical status. Self-reported disability measures are commonly used to capture this component of the back pain experience. In non-acute low back pain there is some uncertainty of the validity of this approach.