Thousands of people present at emergency departments in Ontario yearly with complaints of back pain. While most people are discharged and sent home, many are admitted with severe disabling pain.
Most people having an acute episode of back pain eventually heal but many are not so lucky and go on to suffer chronic and often disabling pain for years.
Treatment options range from walking, massage, psychological treatment, medication, acupuncture, chiropractic care, physiotherapy and medication to surgery. However treatment is often unsuccessful.
Quite often, while back pain affects hundreds of thousands of Canadians each year, doctors are too often unable to find the cause of the pain. This makes it very hard to treat individual patients and it also makes it very hard for the patient to receive compensation for the pain in the form or damages or disability benefits.
But now, the exact cause of an individual’s back pain may be better understood with the improved accuracy of MRI scans of spinal discs using a new technique being researched in Australia, knowns as decay variance.
In a recently published medical study, researchers have shown how they captured spinal disc degeneration in rabbits using the new decay variance technique, where they achieved an accuracy rate of 97 per cent.
This means they compared the image of the disc with the actual disc in a post mortem examination , and the actual disc matched the image 97 per cent of the time.
Experts think degeneration of the spinal discs is a cause of back pain but current tests for disc degeneration don’t work very well. Patients with discs that look healthy on MRI often have severe back pain and patients with discs that look very degenerate on T2 MRI often have no back pain. It is therefore obvious that better technology is needed.
Current MRI techniques see how quickly or slowly individual atoms line up with a magnetic field after a strong burst of radio waves- this is called signal decay. Researchers are discovering that instead of trying to figure out how fast or slow this signal decay is, the new technique being researched measures whether the atoms in a sample are lining up at the same speed as each othe, or a range of different speeds- hence decay variance.
Human trial are months away from beginning. Hopefully in the not too distant future , the Easter Bunny will be providing us with the clues to a new and exciting diagnostic took to assist in the evaluation and treatment of back pain.