Appraisal of a randomized control trial study.
Introduction.
In a randomized control trial on short-term effects of 5% dextrose epidural injections for chronic back pain, where a group of nun surgical chronic lower back pain was injected with saline. The study was able to blind both the injector and the participant hence making the validity of the study to be raised (Noble and Smith, 2015). This was done by the introduction of assistants who were able to guide the procedure passively collecting data and recording coding them and securing them with passwords as well as not disclosing any information to the injector and the participant.
Results and conclusions.
Concerning results, no baseline differences came up between the groups with 845 of dextrose recipients, and 19% of saline recipients reported more than 50% pain reduction. It is an indicating a substantial neurogenic effect of 5% dextrose on pain.
Clinical use and considerations.
The study did not take care of any complications or adverse effects that could arise from the doses of both the dextrose and the normal saline. However, the selection of 10mls as the dose for all the patients was from the clinical experience. These make the study also not easy to use in a clinical set up since pain from each patient is different (Maniquis-Smigel, 2017). Besides, the small sample size of 35 participants treated for about 6months limits the researchers’ ability to assess the outcome of the study clinically.
The study had limitations for the fact that it was conducted within a short period of 2 weeks in the 6 months of study and may not be efficient to determine impact with the seasonal pain. Also, since the patients may have received other analgesics before the study hence long-term effects of other analgesics were not easy to assess.
Conclusion.
In the study, dextrose resulted in some analgesic effects within 15 minutes and persisted for 48 hours in a patient with chronic lower back pain. There is, therefore, a great need to further the study to determine the mechanism of action of dextrose to pain management and the possibility of clinical application.
References:
Maniquis-Smigel, L., Reeves, K. D., Rosen, H. J., Lyftogt, J., Graham-Coleman, C., Cheng, A.
L., &Rabago, D. (2017). Short term analgesic effects of 5% dextrose epidural injections
for chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial. Anesthesiology and pain
medicine, 7(1).
Noble, H., & Smith, J. (2015). Issues of validity and reliability in qualitative research. Evidence-
Based Nursing, ebnurs-2015.
