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Comment & Response
December 12, 2017

Radiofrequency Denervation for Chronic Low Back Pain

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Anesthesiology, Stanford University, Stanford, California
JAMA. 2017;318(22):2256. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.16382

To the Editor Dr Juch and colleagues1 found that radiofrequency denervation plus exercise provided no clinically significant improvement compared with exercise alone, using a minimal clinically important difference (MCID) of at least 2.0 points on an 11-point numeric rating scale for low back pain from Ostelo et al.2 For example, in the facet joint trial, Juch and colleagues compared the mean numeric rating scale scores between the 2 treatment groups at the same time point of 3 months. This difference, at the adjusted level of −0.18, was less than the MCID of 2.0.

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