You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Therapeutics/Prevention
Randomised controlled trial
Up to 4000 mg of paracetamol a day is ineffective for acute low back pain
  1. Andrew Moore
  1. Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
  1. Correspondence to : Dr Andrew Moore, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, The Churchill, Oxford OX3 7LE, UK; andrew.moore{at}ndcn.ox.ac.uk
View Full Text

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ebmed-2014-110157

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Commentary on: Williams CM, Maher CG, Latimer J, et al. Efficacy of paracetamol for acute low-back pain: a double-blind, randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2014;384:1586–96OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science.

    Context

    Back pain affected 9% in a global prevalence study1 and acute low back pain had an incidence of 38/1000 person-years in a large US armed forces survey.2 It is a common reason for seeing a general practitioner. Paracetamol taken regularly is advised as the first drug treatment option by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

    Methods

    This large (N=1650) randomised, double-blind, double-dummy clinical trial tested paracetamol in acute low back pain.3 Regular paracetamol (3 times per day, 3990 mg) and as-needed …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Copyright information:

    Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions