Chronic lower back pain? Mindfulness-based meditation improved physical functioning and depression in a small pilot study

Mindfulness-based functional therapy may become a tool more widely used to help people with persistent lower back pain. The results of a pilot study published in Frontiers in Psychology are so encouraging that the research team is calling for larger trials.
The team took a sample of 16 adults who were an average age of 47 years and had experienced lower back pain for about eight years.
Therapy involved eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training, cognitive-functional physiotherapeutic movement retraining, pain education and group support. At the start and end of the therapy and six months later, measures were taken of functional disability, emotional functioning, mindfulness, pain catastrophising and health-related quality of life.
Satisfaction with the therapy was high; 85% of participants were highly satisfied. And improvements were reported when it came to pain catastrophising, physical functioning, role limitations due to physical condition and depression.
“Mindfulness-based functioning therapy is feasible to implement in primary care,” explains the research team. “Preliminary findings suggest that a randomized controlled trial is warranted to investigate its efficacy in improving physical and emotional functioning in people with disabling persistent lower back pain.”