Steroid shots for chronic back pain are of little help, a new research suggests.
Researchers said that study findings showed no difference in pain between patients who received the steroids and those who received a simple anesthetic.
The study led by Janna Friedly - M.D., assistant professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle - aimed at finding out if patients who received corticosteroid injections in combination with a local anesthetic had different pain levels and physical limitations than those who received only the anesthetic.
These two treatments are usual options for chronic back pain or spinal stenosis. In addition to back and leg pain, the condition can lead to numbness, tingling or weakness in the legs.
For the study, Dr Friedly and team randomly assigned 400 spinal stenosis patients to receive either a local anesthetic, in this case lidocaine, or a local anesthetic plus steroids. The participants were told to rate their pain on a 0-10 scale after receiving the injection for three and six weeks. They were also asked to report about their physical limitations on a 0-24 scale called the Roland-Morris Disability Questionairre.
Researchers found that those in the steroid group reported slightly less pain and physical limitation after three weeks of getting injections compared to the anesthetic-only group.
However, the analysis showed no significant difference in physical limitation or pain intensity scores between the groups after six weeks of receiving the shots.
Researchers then asked the participants about satisfaction with treatment. They found that 67 percent of the patients who received steroids were "very" or "somewhat" satisfied compared to 54 percent of those who received the anesthetic alone.
According to the researchers, the increased sense of satisfaction reported by these patients may be because of the slight initial benefit witnessed because of corticosteroid injections. "Compared to injections with local anesthetic alone, injections with glucocorticoids provided these patients with minimal or no additional benefit," Dr Friedly said in a press release.
"If patients are considering an epidural injection, they should talk to their doctor about a lidocaine-only injection, given that corticosteroids do pose risks and this study found that they provided no significant added benefit at six weeks," she said.
This study was published online July 3 in 'The New England Journal of Medicine'.
