Back Pain Sees Little To No Benefit From Steroid Injections

Back pain is a widespread debilitating condition affecting millions of individuals annually. Relief from back and related leg pain is offered in numerous forms by many different provider types. Unfortunately, some of those solutions aren’t all that effective, if at all. Newly published research from the prestigious medical journal New England Journal of Medicine has found steroid injections for the treatment certain types of back pain provides little if any benefit and in some cases has serious side effects. Researchers followed 400 patients from 16 different locations throughout the U.S. who suffered from lumbar central spinal stenosis with moderate-to-severe leg pain and disability - a condition where the space for the nerve roots in the lower spine has narrowed causing impingement on the nerve roots resulting in back and leg pain. Patients received an injection of either lidocaine (a pain killer) or lidocaine with a corticosteroid.  The results not only indicated no significant difference in pain within the two groups, it also revealed five times the number of infections and sickness (ten vs. two) in those receiving the corticosteroid.