Critical Assessment of An Economic Evaluation of a Healthy Lifestyle Intervention for Chronic Low Back Pain (LBP)

Abstract

Background: Globally, chronic low back pain (LBP) contributes significantly to the overall burden of disease, placing a heavy load on society through absenteeism and associated healthcare costs. Finding cost-effective measures to treat and prevent low back pain is therefore of utmost importance. Methods: A critical assessment of the study by Williams et al 2018 was performed by using a variation of the well-known Drummond’s checklist for the critical appraisal of economic evaluations. Results: The authors performed appropriate statistical analyses using the available data. Means and proportions of baseline characteristics of the intervention group were compared to those of the control group to evaluate their comparability. Conclusion: Upon thorough assessment of the appropriateness of the economic evaluation methods used by Williams et al., it is conclusive that the validity of their results is valuable and trusted to a degree, soundly achieving many of the listed Drummond et al requirements, yet failing to take into account a few aspects that grant some weaknesses to the study.