Antibiotics for back pain

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

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In many cases, bacteria appear to be the cause of chronic back pain. If that is the cause, an antibiotic cure will help.

Sometimes all common treatment methods fail for back pain, from pain relievers to physiotherapy to surgery. Hanne Albert from the University of Odense in Denmark has found a common cause of persistent pain that has been neglected for a long time: bacteria that lodge in the spine. And they can be tackled with antibiotics.

Nested bacteria

The culprits are then usually harmless bacteria that are found on the skin, but also occur in the oral flora: Propionibacterium acnes. The germs get into the bloodstream through tiny injuries. If new blood vessels have formed in the damaged vertebral region as a result of a herniated disc, the bacteria can get into the interior of the disc via these.

Even when the incident has healed, the bacteria multiply there and cause inflammation, bone edema and thus pain - so-called "modic changes". Albert and her colleagues found that this is the case in a good half of patients with chronic back pain.

100 days of antibiotics

A massive antibiotic cure helps against unwanted intruders: For 100 days, patients who took part in the study took 1,000 mg of amoxicillin three times a day. The first effects were seen after six to eight weeks. Both pain and functional complaints improved.

The success of the cure then continued over the observation period of two years. For the novel treatment approach for chronic back pain, the Dane has now received the German Prize for Pain Research and Pain Therapy, endowed with 10,000 euros.

The antibiotic cure could not help all patients, "but those with 'modic changes' in which bacteria play a role benefit enormously," says Albert.

Folk ailments No. 1

Back pain is the number one ailment when measured against the number of days employees are sick. Acute complaints that cause downtime of less than six weeks make up the largest proportion of these. But if the back pain becomes chronic, the inability to work can be greatly prolonged - up to and including early retirement. One in five applications for early retirement is due to back pain.

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