The effectiveness of patient education in improving pain, disability and quality of life among older people with low back pain: A systematic review

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to gain an overview of patient education and the effects of patient education for older people with low back pain (LBP).

METHODS: The search strategies were performed via EBSCO MEDLINE, EBSCO CINAHL, Science Direct, PubMed, and PEDro databases from 2006 to 2016. The keywords "patient education", "low back pain", "elderly", "older adults", "older persons" and "older people" were used during the literature search. Boolean operators were used to expand or limit the searching scope and manual exclusion was performed to choose articles eligible for this study.

RESULTS: A total of 2799 articles were retrieved but only five articles were related with patient education for older people with LBP. Findings suggest that patient education for older people may differ in terms of its contents such as health education, self-management, video education, and postural education. The high methodological quality of the studies revealed that patient education showed improvement in terms of pain, disability and quality of life among older people with LBP.

CONCLUSIONS: Patient education improved pain and had positive effects on disability and quality of life among older people with LBP. However, due to the limited number of RCTs more studies are needed to provide evidence for its effectiveness.