A RCT to determine the duration of analgesia after 15&30-minutes of acupuncture-like TENS on patients with chronic lbp

Acupuncture-like TENS (AL-TENS) has been shown to produce prolonged pain relief, but no study has yet investigated its duration on a population suffering from chronic low back pain (CLPB). The objective of the study was to objective was to quantify the duration and magnitude of analgesia induced by a 15- or 30-minute application of AL-TENS.

The AL-TENS applications induced a clinically and statistically significant (p = 0.003) analgesia in all participants. Median duration of analgesia was 9 hours and 10 hours 30 minutes following the 15- and 30-minute AL-TENS applications, respectively; this 1.5-hour difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.55). Furthermore, we observed no significant difference in the magnitude of analgesia between both applications of AL-TENS (p > 0.56), suggesting that the duration of application of AL-TENS does not influence the magnitude of analgesia. The results suggest that clinicians could use a 15-minute AL-TENS application to provide significant analgesia in patients presenting with low back pain since if provides a comparable analgesia versus a 30-minute application.