Prevalence of Long-Term Low Back Pain After Symptomatic Lumbar Disc Herniation

OBJECTIVE: Lumbar disc herniation (LDH) is a global issue associated with potentially debilitating long-term consequences, including chronic low back pain (LBP). Short-term outcomes (<2 years) of patients with LDH have been extensively studied and demonstrate improvements in back and leg pain for both operative and conservative management. However, these improvements may not be sustained long-term (>2 years); patients with LDH may develop recurrent disc herniations, progressive degenerative disc disease, and LBP regardless of management strategy. Therefore, our objective is to determine the prevalence of chronic LBP after LDH, understand the relationship between LDH and chronic LBP, and investigate the relationship between radiological findings and post-operative pain outcomes. METHODS: We performed a literature review on the PubMed database via a combination medical subject heading and keyword-based approach for long-term LBP outcomes in patients with LDH. RESULTS: Fifteen studies (2019 patients) evaluated surgical and/or nonoper-ative outcomes of patients with LDH . Regardless of surgical or nonoperative management, 46.2% of patients with LDH experienced some degree of LBP long-term (range 2-27 years) as compared to a point prevalence of LBP in the general population of only 11.9%. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with LDH are more likely to experience long-term LBP compared to the general population (46.2% vs. 11.9%). Additionally, under-standing the relationship between radiological findings and pain outcomes re-mains a major challenge as the presence of radiological changes and the degree of LBP do not always correlate. Therefore, higher quality studies are needed to better understand the relationship between radiological findings and pain outcomes.