Back pain in seniors: the Back pain Outcomes using Longitudinal Data (BOLD) cohort baseline data

Back pain is the most common reason worldwide for years living with disability (YLDs) [1]. In the United States in 2010, low back pain was the top contributor to YLDs, outranking diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes [2]. Although back pain is common among adults aged 65 years and older (“seniors”), it has been under-studied in this age group [3, 4]. Recently, several publications from groups outside the U.S. have begun to explore this issue [5‐7]. Nonetheless, relatively little is known concerning how back pain, function, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) differ according to patient sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, especially among the elderly in the United States.

In this study, we addressed these knowledge gaps using baseline data from the Back pain Outcomes using Longitudinal Data (BOLD) cohort of patients aged 65 years and older initiating a new episode of care for back pain [8]. Our primary focus was to determine the associations of patient age, sex, race, ethnicity, and education with patient-reported measures of pain, function, and HRQoL. A unique strength of BOLD is the geographic diversity of the cohort participants. Therefore, we evaluated the magnitude of the differences in the characteristics of back pain patients across recruitment sites, the strength of the association between patient characteristics and baseline measures, and whether associations between patient characteristics and patient-reported outcomes are consistent across the three recruitment sites.

This is the largest cohort to date of adults aged 65 and older with a new episode of care for back pain. Our results show that there are important differences in pain intensity, physical disability, and health-related quality of life across different healthcare sites and across different patient age, sex, and racial subgroups. These findings are of importance to both researchers and clinicians. For researchers comparing the effectiveness of interventions in observational studies, our findings emphasize the importance of adjusting for any patient baseline differences between treatment groups in factors that are associated with outcome measures of pain, function, and HRQoL. For example, education level appears to be important in this regard, but often is not reported or adjusted for in such studies. Our findings also indicate that identifiable subgroups of older patients may differ substantially at the time of initiating a new episode of care for back pain. This suggests the potential value of applying different interventions tailored to these different subgroups. Moreover, the baseline characteristics of patients and the healthcare system environment in which they are located should be considered when evaluating treatment outcomes.

We observed sizable differences in baseline patient-reported measures across recruitment sites, with patients from the Detroit site worse on most measures as compared to the Boston and Northern California sites. Site differences in disability and pain persisted even after controlling for demographic factors available to us. It is possible that unmeasured socioeconomic differences are responsible at least in part for the site differences. Detroit was suffering from a severe economic recession during the study time-frame, and depressed economic conditions have been shown to be associated with poorer well-being and quality of life in the elderly [19]. Our findings emphasize the limitations of single-site observational studies, which may not be generalizable to other settings.

Our finding that less educated patients reported worse function is concordant with a review by Dionne and colleagues of education and back pain [20]. They speculated that education may be a marker for other factors, such as ability to adapt to stress, access to healthcare, occupational factors, and behavioral/environmental factors. All patients in our study had access to healthcare. However, it is possible that less educated patients also were financially disadvantaged and may have delayed care due to concerns about having to pay co-insurance costs. Less educated patients may be economically disadvantaged and under more psychosocial stress, which could affect health outcomes. Another possibility is that the association of lower education with worse health-related measures reflects the cumulative effects of social disadvantage on disease burden [21].

The finding that women present with worse pain and physical disability than men is consistent with prior research in largely younger populations [22‐24].

While there was increasing pain-related physical disability (RMDQ score) with age, pain severity was not clearly associated with age. Prior studies in conditions other than back pain have yielded conflicting findings regarding the association between age and pain severity. Creamer found no association between age and pain severity in a sample of patients with knee osteoarthritis [25]. Thomas [26] and Parsons [27] found increasing pain severity with increasing age for a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. In a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries, pain reporting did not vary by age [28].

Somewhat surprising was that, independent of age, patients who had retired for reasons other than ill health also had worse pain and physical disability than those patients still working. While this might be due in part to the healthy worker effect [29], other authors have found retirement associated with a variety of symptoms such as declining mobility and daily activities, and declining mental health [30], including depression [31].

In our multivariable analysis, we found that even after adjusting for site, education, pain duration and other factors, African-American race was associated with worse baseline physical disability and pain at presentation for back pain-related care. This finding is consistent with other studies that found worse pain-related disability in cohorts of African-Americans compared with other races [32‐35]. Thus, our observation of worse pain and physical disability among African-Americans compared with Caucasians could be explained by different coping strategies, or could be a result of residual confounding in our multivariable analysis.

Patients with diagnosis codes indicating leg involvement or spinal stenosis reported slightly worse physical disability. This is concordant with other studies indicating that patients with leg involvement have more severe pain and physical disability than those without [36‐38].

Adjusting for other variables, as compared with patients who never smoked, those who were former smokers reported somewhat higher levels of physical disability and pain, and current smokers reported even higher levels of disability and pain. Substantial prior research has linked smoking to worse back pain outcomes, and one study of patients with spine-related back or leg pain found that compared with patients who had never smoked, current smokers reported greater pain; in longitudinal analyses, compared with patients who continued to smoke, those who quit reported significantly greater improvement in pain [39].

It is worth emphasizing that our large sample size allowed us to detect what were frequently relatively small differences in patient reported measures between subgroups. The importance of the magnitude of these differences on an individual level is uncertain.

One of the limitations of our project is that we enrolled nearly two-thirds of the cohort from a single site – Northern California Kaiser-Permanente. A second limitation is that nearly all of the Hispanics were from one site (Northern California) and a majority of African-Americans were from another site (Detroit). This distribution of patients limits the overall generalizability of our findings. Differences observed in self-reported measures and outcomes may reflect site-specific differences that are based on local healthcare system or patient-specific factors. Because patients at the 3 sites had different sociodemographic characteristics, we will need to control for these factors in future analyses. A third limitation is that we enrolled 39% of patients initially identified as potentially eligible. Because these patients did not complete questionnaires, we cannot further characterize this non-enrolled group, but we acknowledge that they potentially limit generalizability.

Another limitation is that this study was not designed to determine sociodemographic differences between subgroups with low back pain, but rather was designed to examine the natural history of back pain among seniors at three integrated health systems. Subgroup differences may reflect institutional and other local factors that we did not measure, such as income and co-pays, that could influence access to healthcare and hence utilization and outcomes.

While ours is the first cohort of seniors with back pain assembled from a primary care setting in the United States, there have been similar cohorts assembled internationally. The Back Complaints in the Elders (BACE) [40] group is a consortium of investigators from the Netherlands, Australia and Brazil who are assembling similar but smaller cohorts, planned to be around 750 patients per national cohort. The first of these to be published was the Dutch BACE cohort that enrolled 675 patients [7]. Their inclusion criteria were similar to ours, recruiting primary care patients with a new episode of care for back pain. They included slightly younger patients (>55 years old). They also had a slightly shorter allowed interval between the index visit and when they contacted patients, allowing a maximum of 2 weeks compared with 3 weeks for our study. These studies will provide an opportunity to compare and contrast the presentation, diagnosis and treatments of seniors with back pain between the U.S. and other countries.

In summary, we have presented the BOLD baseline results describing the demographic and baseline patient-reported measures. Site was strongly associated with baseline patient reported measures. It is unclear whether site differences were due to geographical factors, socio-cultural factors specific to a particular area, or factors specific to the healthcare system that oversees the care of these patients. Adjusting for site reveals continued association among key demographic variables of race, age, and education with presenting pain. Our results lay the groundwork for future studies involving this cohort.