Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology
Volume 17, Issue 1 , Pages 57-70, February 2003

Neck pain

Department of Rheumatic Diseases, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Article Outline

Abstract 

Neck pain is second only to low back pain as the most common musculoskeletal disorder in population surveys and primary care, and, like low back pain, it poses a significant health and economic burden, being a frequent source of disability. While most individuals with acute neck pain do not seek health care, those that do account for a disproportionate amount of health care costs. Furthermore, in the setting of the whiplash syndrome, neck pain accounts for significant costs to society in terms of insurance and litigation, and days lost from work. Much neck pain is not attributable to a specific disease or disorder and is labelled as ‘soft-tissue’ rheumatism or muscular/mechanical/postural neck pain. Most chronic neck pain is attributed to whiplash injury, another enigmatic diagnosis. Despite decades of research and posturing to explain chronic neck pain on the basis of a specific disease or injury, and despite increasingly sophisticated radiological assessment, little advance has been made in either achieving a specific structural diagnosis or, more importantly, in reducing the health and economic burden of chronic neck pain. There is some evidence, however, that measures which address the psychosocial factors that promote pain chronicity, and shift the patient's view away from injury and disease to more benign perspectives on their condition, may be helpful. This chapter considers briefly the magnitude of the neck pain problem, our limitations in understanding it from a traditional medical perspective, and suggestions for therapeutic and societal approaches that appear more likely to be helpful.

Keywords:  neck pain, whiplash injuries, chronic pain

 

The problem with neck pain is that it does not end there. Neck pain, especially chronic neck pain, is often accompanied by a host of other symptoms whose association is difficult to explain on a physiological basis alone. Neck pain is often just one feature of nebulous syndromes like chronic whiplash, myofascial pain syndrome, fibromyalgia, cervicobrachial syndrome, et cetera. Chronic neck pain also brings with it the spectre of litigation (e.g. whiplash issues) and disability claims. In addition there is a tendency for over-investigation and over-treatment, often as a result of the level of a patient's distress at the failure of the medical community to provide helpful answers. In this chapter, we deal with the fact that the epidemiology of neck pain clearly indicates this to be a major health and economic burden, but the traditional diagnostic approach based on history, physical examination, and investigations provides little solution for most patients. We argue that much of this endemic musculoskeletal problem is fostered by psychosocial factors, including personality traits, social status (or lack thereof), iatrogenic and legal factors, and an excessive reliance on the ‘injury or disease model’. The reader is referred to a previous review in this journal for the discussion and approach to neck pain in general.1 In addition to providing an update to this, we focus on certain aspects that deal more with how the current medical approach to neck pain – and whiplash in particular – is unhelpful and requires a re-evaluation in favour of a new paradigm.

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2. Definition and aetiology 

Neck pain is generally defined as stiffness and/or pain felt dorsally in the cervical region somewhere between the occipital condyles and the C7 vertebral prominence. Neck pain, however, is often accompanied by pain in the occiput (a headache), the upper thoracic region, and the jaws. Clinically, it is recognized that even in subjects with no evidence of nerve root irritation or compression, neck pain may be associated with pain referred along myotomal patterns to the anterior chest, arm, and dorsal spine regions. The neurological examination would, of course, be normal.

The less common causes of neck pain include tumours, systemic arthropathy (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis), infections, thyroid disorders, oesophageal obstruction or reflux disease. Additionally, the neck is a site for referred pain from cardiac, gastric and diaphragmatic disease processes. Yet, perhaps 95% of neck pain patients will receive a more benign diagnosis, for example, neck sprain, mechanical neck pain, muscular neck pain, myofascial pain syndrome, postural neck pain, etcetera. These latter diagnoses are both a blessing and a curse for the patient. While they reflect a benign aspect in terms of mortality, the vagueness of the diagnosis often leaves the patient searching for a more definitive pathological understanding of their pain, and they soon encounter many who are willing to creatively ascribe the pain to facet joint and other subluxations, trigger points and muscle bands, chronic musculoligamentous injury, etcetera – the non-specificity of most neck pain is fodder for the imaginative therapist to produce a remarkable array of unprovable and untestable explanations.

The most remarkable aspects of the aetiology of neck pain, acute as well as chronic, are how seldom we know or can tell the patient we have identified the source of pain. The corollary is, how often obvious pathology exists in entirely asymptomatic patients. A population-based best estimate of the outcome of acute neck pain is that at least 80% of all acute neck pain resolves within days to weeks.2., 3., 4. Even though we believe that there should be a structural cause for neck pain that lasts a short period like this, we can seldom identify a source. In chronic neck pain, that lasts for at least 6 weeks, we again do not know the structural basis in most cases. When pain is referred to the neck from other sites (i.e. myocardial ischaemia), although we have a general theory of this referral pattern from an anatomical understanding of nerve root embryology we do not know why some patients with myocardial ischaemia have neck pain and others do not. Finally, we know from clinical experience and radiological studies, for example, that patients with rheumatoid arthritis can have extensive inflammatory destruction of the atlantoaxial structure with no symptoms at all. In other studies (see below) individuals may have large osteophytes and marked degenerative changes, again with no symptoms.

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3. Epidemiology and risk factors 

Chronic neck pain is perhaps second only to chronic low back pain as the most common musculoskeletal disorder associated with injury and disability claims, both in the work place and after motor vehicle collisions. At any given time, approximately 10% of the population reports having neck pain on at least 7 days per month, and neck pain (of unspecified duration) occurs in at least 80% of the population at some time2., 3., 4., with a 20–30% annual incidence of acute neck pain in population-based studies.5., 6. These figures hold for a number of different countries, although there are limited data that neck pain may be less common in Asia.7

Linton recently examined studies dealing with psychosocial risk factors in acute neck and back pain.8 Factors cited include preceding stressful life events or depression. It is not clear why these associations evolve, whether psychological distress causes individuals to notice, amplify, and focus on life's ordinary and minor aches and pains or whether psychological distress can manifest itself as spinal pain. Independent risk factors for incident neck pain also include poor general health at baseline, female gender, obesity, a previous history of neck injury or of concomitant pain elsewhere, and higher numbers of children.2., 5., 6., 9. These are, interestingly, the same risk factors for other regional musculoskeletal pain disorders.2

Other risk factors for incident neck pain which have a more ‘mechanical’ or ‘occupational’ flavour include duration of sitting, duration of twisting and bending the trunk in working postures.10 Studies thus far, however, have failed to find neck flexion, neck extension, neck rotation, arm force and posture, hand–arm vibration, workplace design, or sports/exercise to be risk factors for incident neck pain.11 There has been only one prospective study to assess the relation between work-related psychosocial factors and incident neck pain, with appropriate adjustment for both work-related and non-work-related physical factors and individual characteristics. This study, reported recently by Ariens et al12, indicates that high quantitative job demands (e.g. working under time pressure or working with deadlines) and low co-worker support are independent risk factors for neck pain. Not surprisingly, given relatively few physical risk factors for acute neck pain, many mechanical interventions studied for prevention of neck pain in the work place have failed to demonstrate any benefit, except for exercises, which modestly reduce the future incidence of neck pain and work absenteeism.13 Neck pain thus remains costly, a common cause of disability, and responsible for a significant proportion of work absenteeism, and lost productivity.2

There have been various studies showing, however, that not everyone with neck (or back) pain seeks health care providers, and these individuals who thereby become ‘patients'are a self-selected subgroup. There are a wide array of independent predictors as to who will seek a health care provider.14., 15., 16. Cote et al, for example, studied approximately 800 subjects from a population-based sample in Saskatchewan, Canada, these subjects having experienced neck or back pain in the previous 4 weeks. They found that approximately 25% of subjects sought some form of health care provider. While it is encouraging that 75% were not attending a health care provider, the fact that spinal pain is so common means that the 25% who did still account for a large health care expenditure for the treatment of acute neck pain. As expected, various factors such as neck pain severity, duration, and presence of co-morbidities were predictors of who sought health care. Cote et al further found, however, that even if one controls for pain severity, pain duration, socio-economic status, co-morbidities and various other factors known to modify health care seeking (i.e. medicalization), spinal pain that occurred in the setting of a traffic collision or that was attributed to an occupational factor was more likely to lead to medicalization than when it occurred in other settings (usually without an external attributable cause). This suggests that, with all else being equal in terms of the subject characteristics and the neck pain characteristics, the subject's impression of the need to attend a health care provider is modified by their own attribution of cause and effect. This might be a personal response stemming from the individual, but may also be directed by employers and ‘on-the-scene’ attendants (in the case of a traffic collision). Whether this response pattern varies from one culture to another has not been well studied, although there is evidence that race itself is a factor that predicts health care seeking, even within a given society.15., 16.

Most individuals have short-lived episodes of neck pain, and therefore the challenge in understanding the transition from acute to chronic pain is to identify at an early stage distinguishing risk factors which predict this progression. Linton's review8 provided strong evidence that this transition could be independently predicted by concurrent psychosocial factors. He suggested on the basis of convincing data that passive coping strategies, fear-avoidance behaviours, and catastrophizing are predictors of persistent pain and disability. It is our clinical experience that the medical community usually fails to either assess or subsequently manage the psychosocial events and dysfunctions that patients bring to their physicians, perhaps because they are ‘masked’, or presented only in terms of the pain. According to available evidence, these psychosocial problems do not go away, but are simply re-packaged as part of the chronic pain syndrome.

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4. Physical symptoms and signs of neck pain 

The traditional medical model involves searching for underlying tissue pathology and is based on an analysis of the history, physical examination and investigations. There are no studies which examine the specificity or sensitivity of various symptoms or signs for differing diagnoses in neck pain patients. An attempt has been made using ‘red flags’ in patients with low back pain. Even here they have poor specificity and no similar factors have been studied for neck pain. Nor are there studies which therefore tell the clinician how well a given symptom or sign or combination thereof separates more benign causes from more serious ones (i.e. muscular pain versus malignancy). Nevertheless, clinical experience has taught us that patients with predominantly nocturnal neck pain, or neck pain associated with any of night sweats, fevers, weight loss, swallowing difficulties, or voice hoarseness, appear more likely to have a specific identifiable disease as the cause of that neck pain. Investigations are probably useful in these patients, even with a paucity of any significant physical findings. Among physical examination findings in neck pain patients, the detection of any region of swelling, or the observation of clear and objective neurological findings such as an absent reflex, hyperreflexia with extensor plantar responses, muscle wasting or weakness, or sensory loss of a clear dermatomal distribution are also likely to yield a structural cause upon investigation. The specificity and sensitivity of range of motion has not been studied, but remains a sign that can be modified by the subjective factors such as pain sensation, and we would regard it as unhelpful. When neck pain is part of a more systemic disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis, the diagnosis is seldom difficult.

Yet, the dilemma for physicians is that most cases of neck pain lack any of the features that point to a specific pathology. The most common symptoms in neck pain patients, in both primary and tertiary care centres, are expressed with a report of pain intensity, pain location and character (dull, sharp, constant, intermittent, etcetera), radiating or referred pain, and numbness or sensory changes. Physical examination in most neck pain patients is positive only for a reduced range of active motion, and tenderness on palpation. Contrary to many other medical disorders, we do not know what, if any, structural factors or tissue pathology causes most cases of neck pain. The medical model here fails in its traditional approach – we cannot as readily fix what we cannot identify pathologically. Instead, the illness is largely subjective in nature, and associated symptoms, especially in patients with chronic neck pain, are usually equally vague – including arm fatigue, headache, dizziness, generalized weakness, tingling, et cetera. There are, of course, many health care providers who appear to be able to explain convincingly to patients the specific anatomical abnormality underlying their symptoms. This might provide a degree of short-term reassurance to a patient, especially one who is destined for a rapid, spontaneous improvement. Until this has been demonstrated, however, we believe that this approach is dishonest and is clearly not evidence-based.

Borghouts et al17 reviewed various studies of the clinical course and prognostic factors of the non-specific forms of neck pain physicians encounter most. They found the available studies to be small and of generally poor quality, yet they did report that the pain characteristics of local versus radiating did not predict long-term outcome. A higher intensity of pain and a history of previous neck pain were more likely to be associated with chronicity. Still, this was as much as could be concluded from the available studies. In chronic pain in general, tender point count is an indicator of emotional distress rather than diagnostic specificity or pathology18, and tender point count correlates with fatigue and depression independently of the presence or absence of pain.19 In chronic neck pain patients specifically state anxiety (anxiety that comes on with the starting of some undertaking) is a predictor of tender point count independently of pain severity and duration.20., 21. This may explain, for example, why, in one study, more tender points were seen in whiplash patients (without fracture) versus leg fracture patients, despite the fact that leg fracture patients suffer more extensive tissue damage than do whiplash patients.22., 23..

There is additional research directed at signs of physical examination that may be markers for chronicity, and which may provide a useful measure to the clinician to decide when a more in-depth analysis of psychosocial factors is warranted. Just as there are so-called non-organic or behavioural (Waddell) signs in low back pain, research has begun to develop a framework for similar signs in neck pain. Sobel et al24 have suggested that these might include superficial tenderness, rotation less than 50% to the left and right, regional sensory disturbances (not conforming to a dermatomal, nerve root, or peripheral nerve distribution), jerky, give-way weakness in the arms, and overreaction (stiff or rigid movements, rubbing the affected area, clutching or grabbing the area, grimacing, sighing). While these have been tested for inter-rater variability, they have yet to be tested in the way behavioural signs for low back pain have been studied, showing them to be useful for detecting the effects of underlying psychological distress (correlation with psychometric measures), and as predictors of poor surgical and rehabilitation outcomes in the absence of psychological intervention. In low back pain, these signs have also been of value in deciding when it is useful to introduce psychological intervention during rehabilitation with an effectiveness such that, after inclusion of such therapy, the non-organic signs no longer predict adverse outcomes.25., 26. However, there are important caveats with these signs. First, while they may obviously suggest a malingerer, who wrongly thinks they are making a more convincing impression on the examiner, these signs are found even in individuals with known physical pathology. Their presence reflects not the absence of organicity (thus, ‘behavioural’ signs is a better term than ‘non-organic’), but rather that the severity of symptoms, disability and behaviour cannot be explained on the basis of physical pathology alone. Thus, anxiety, depression, and a tendency to focus on a symptom will amplify the pain response, and affect the behaviour during examination in ways that physical pathology will not.

In summary, in most neck pain patients, the history and physical examination will not lead to a specific pathological diagnosis but will perhaps allow the clinician to reassure the patient that more serious causes of neck pain are not evident. Given that pain intensity is a predictor of a higher likelihood of chronicity, this, together with consideration of behavioural signs, may at least help the clinician to identify early the patient who needs a much more intensive discussion of their concerns about their neck pain, what they have heard, what they fear, and why they need to understand and be reassured of the benign nature of their condition. High tender point counts are a marker for distress, and concomitant psychosocial stressors or attribution issues may explain why the patient has brought their neck pain to a physician on this occasion. The patient's life circumstances and concerns need to be explored in such cases, as otherwise they simply re-surface in the development of chronic pain. In patients with acute low back pain, an explanatory, reassuring booklet (‘the back book’) has been shown to be a useful therapeutic addition.27 Although it has not been formally tested, ‘the whiplash book’ provides very similar education and reassurance (personal communication, Dr A. K. Burton, Huddersfield, UK, April 20, 2002).

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5. Diagnosis and radiological assessment of neck pain 

The differential diagnosis of neck pain has been described in detail in an earlier issue.1 It is worth emphasizing here the rather disappointing fact that the myriad of imaging techniques available to physicians provide little or no diagnostic assistance in most neck pain patients. Radiological investigation seems pertinent when a patient presents with neck pain and any of weight loss, dysphagia, neck lumps, nocturnal pain only, or physical examination findings suggestive of radiculopathy (loss of reflexes, objective motor weakness, dermatomal-pattern sensory loss), but most neck pain patients lack these symptoms. In cases of trauma, an X-ray is often used to look for fracture. A recent study suggests a ‘neck rule’ for ordering X-rays in those with neck pain following trauma. Hoffman et al28 studied over 30 000 cases of blunt trauma to the neck (i.e. no penetrating injury) of various causes, mainly following motor vehicle collisions. They developed a decision instrument which requires patients to meet five criteria in order to be classified as having a low probability of injury: no midline cervical tenderness, no focal neurological deficit, normal alertness, no intoxication, and no painful, distracting injury (another injury that was painful enough that it might distract the patient from noticing the severity of their neck tenderness). With this decision rule, eight of 818 patients with bony injury were missed, and only two of these eight were considered to have clinically significant injuries (i.e. those with potential for complications). Despite the apparent usefulness of these criteria, concerns have been raised that to be the physician who misses these few cases of relevant injury is hazardous in the current medicolegal environment. Thus, many physicians will order neck X-rays despite this rule. While this may be a problem from an economic standpoint, we feel that the greater problem with X-rays is the wrongful attribution of special significance to otherwise benign findings.

The temptation to attribute a patient's pain to those radiological findings that are seen, for example, as degenerative changes, has long been present because it is difficult to understand why they should not be a cause of pain. The term degenerative disc disease, coined in the 1940s, continues to be the peg on which the chronic neck pain syndrome is hung by some physicians, although it is patently clear that once studies control for age, there is no independent correlation between symptoms and any such sample of disc findings, regardless of how they are detected (X-ray, discography, CT scan, MRI). The history of these studies is reviewed in detail elsewhere.29 Even findings of disc protrusion (without nerve root or spinal cord compression), spinal stenosis, and small degrees of subluxation of one vertebra, or angulations of one in respect to adjacent ones, have no predictive value for the presence of neck pain, and are just as frequently found in asymptomatic subjects. On the other hand, where there is a good clinical reason to suspect a specific root lesion – based on the neurological examination – a CT or MRI may provide necessary pre-operative anatomical confirmation. Yet, the notion that degenerative disc disease or cervical osteoarthritis is specifically associated with neck pain remains a myth propagated to this day.29., 30.

The problem with continuing to tell patients that their pain arises from degenerative change or osteoarthritis of the spine is that (a) it is untrue, and (b) we believe it immediately gives the patient the impression that they have a chronic, unrelenting and probably untreatable cause of pain, much like osteoarthritis in other regions of the body. Given the risk that the patient may respond to this diagnosis by withdrawing from activities (something that may make sense to an arthritis patient), developing anxiety, keeping pain diaries, and seeking many different forms of ‘cure’, the chance of harming the patient by attributing their pain to the radiological findings should be too much of a concern for physicians to do it so lightly. Patients should be told that they would have their neck pain regardless of what their X-rays look like, and that they would (and did) have degenerative changes (‘arthritis of the spine’) even without pain. This series of explanations, while they do not give the patient what they often crave – a clear diagnosis – also do not contribute to iatrogenic effects that might otherwise lead acute neck pain to become chronic neck pain.

Providing evidence that X-rays do not help in diagnosis, Johnson and Lucas31 undertook an evaluation of the value of screening cervical spine X-rays in patients with non-traumatic neck pain. They found that 54% of 470 patients had X-rays read as degenerative changes, 35% were read as normal, 8.5% were read as consistent with muscle spasm, and the remainder were read as having anatomical or congenital variants or old compression fractures. The X-rays led to no diagnoses such as acute fracture, dislocation, or neoplasm that would have placed the patient at jeopardy had the X-ray not been done. Furthermore, Borghouts et al18 found that radiological findings of disc and joint degeneration in the cervical spine did not predict the outcome of acute neck pain, so the physician cannot even use them for prognosis.

Finally, in the case of acute whiplash injury – a common consideration for ordering an X-ray in patients with neck pain – radiological studies (including MRI scans) are of no value in the acute or chronic setting other than in excluding a fracture or dislocation or for confirming the mechanism for nerve root compression in the small minority of patients with Grade 3 or Grade 4 whiplash-associated disorder. The limited value of radiological procedures in whiplash patients has also been dealt with in detail elsewhere.32

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6. Treatment of acute neck pain 

Despite the fact that only 25% of acute neck pain may lead the patient to seek health care4, and only a percentage of these patients will develop chronic pain, this percentage accounts for disproportionately higher costs. Thus, the Quebec Task Force on Whiplash-Associated Disorders found, for example, that 12% of whiplash patients in Quebec remained in chronic pain 1 year after their collision. Yet, these 12% accounted for 47% of costs of all whiplash injuries in terms of treatment and lost wages.33 Thus, treatments which prevent the progression from acute to chronic pain are highly desirable.

Most studies regarding treatment of acute neck pain deal with whiplash patients. In 1995 the Quebec Task Force on Whiplash-Associated Disorders reviewed the studies on treatment of acute whiplash patients upto 1994.34 The conclusions from this review, and a similar review by Kjellman et al35 for the same time period (although the latter included foreign-language studies) emphasize the paucity of good quality studies. Still, from available data, it is clear that therapy prescriptions which have an exercise component (active therapy) are superior to those which do not (i.e. those relying on passive therapy modalities such as ultrasound, manipulation, massage, heat, TENS, and laser). Shown not to be efficacious by controlled study are electromagnetic therapy, traction, collars, TENS, ultrasound, spray and stretch, local corticosteroid injections, trigger point injections, and laser therapy.1 The Quebec Task Force found the effectiveness of manipulation/chiropractic therapy in acute neck pain to be equivocal, as study design either reflected significantly different baseline characteristics in cohorts, or some studies failed to find a therapeutic effect. Because of the mixed prescriptions of multiple passive modalities and multiple exercises in some studies, it is not clear whether exercise is better because it is effective or because passive therapy is harmful, or both. It is also not clear what aspect or type of exercise therapy is more effective. Since 1994 there have been a few more studies of treatment of acute neck pain, summarized by Peeters et al36 recently to indicate again that exercise therapies are superior to passive modalities and that ‘rest makes rusty’. One of the most impressive studies in acute whiplash patients was that of Borchgrevink et al37 in Norway, in which they compared the therapeutic advice to ‘act-as-usual’ to not having that advice, in a randomized group of 241 neck pain patients whose onset of pain was within 24hours of a motor vehicle collision and who had no signs or radiological findings to suggest neurological injury or fracture. All patients received instructions for self-training of the neck (neck school) and a 5-day prescription for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. One group was instructed to act as usual and received no sick leave or collar. Patients in the immobilization group received 14 days of sick leave and a soft collar. At 6 months after the collision, the ‘act as usual’ group had a better outcome in several variables, including pain, concentration and memory. The study is impressive because the difference between the two groups was simply advice with no sick leave and no collar, versus both sick leave and a collar. The extent to which it was the advice that was beneficial versus the collar being harmful is, however, not known, yet the outcome in the act as usual group was better than is typically reported in most studies, suggesting some definite benefit to that advice. The effect of an intervention to not give sick leave and to tell the patient to act-as-usual points to the importance of modifying behaviour in preventing the transition from acute to chronic neck pain. More studies of this type are needed.

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7. Treatment of chronic neck pain 

The studies evaluating treatments for chronic neck pain suffer also from being few in number, having very mixed populations, and limited clinical information about the patients, as well as having widely varying inclusion and exclusion criteria. The review by Kjellman et al35 of studies up to 1995 reveals that, for chronic neck pain of varying duration (from 3 months to more than 2 years), only five of 27 randomized clinical trials of treatment of chronic neck pain had a follow-up to 6 months or more, and four of those five found negative outcomes for the treatment intervention. Still, exercise programmes appeared to have the larger benefit.

7.1. Exercise therapy 

The first trial of multidisciplinary (exercise, occupational therapy, and behavioural intervention) treatment for chronic whiplash was conducted by Vendrig et al.38 They conducted an uncontrolled trial of exercise in which the subjects were diagnosed as having chronic whiplash and had been off work for at least 6 months. A total of 26 subjects underwent a 4-week exercise rehabilitation programme, with educational efforts designed to abolish inappropriate pain behaviour and to restore fitness. Group sessions involved discussion of deeply rooted beliefs regarding symptoms and disability. These subjects had high levels of pain and distress when entering the programme. At 6-month follow-up, 96% lacked indications of psychological distress, and 46% were pain-free. Even the group with persisting symptoms had a 50% reduction in their severity. The result was a complete-return-to-work rate of 65% and a return-to-work (partial or complete) rate of 92% at 6 months follow-up. During the follow-up phase of 6 months, less than 20% of subjects sought any other care. Although these results are most impressive, there was no parallel, untreated control group for comparison. Another recent study of chronic neck pain, but this time not specifying whether collision victims were included, compared adding spinal manipulation to exercise.39 The addition of spinal manipulation was not beneficial, and exercise therapy alone was better than spinal manipulation alone in various outcome measures. Taimela et al40 compared 24 sessions of proprioceptive exercise and behavioural support to a neck lecture and two sessions of instructions for home exercises; a further control group was given only a recommendation to exercise and one lecture on neck care. The subjects were recruited from occupational health care systems, and were diagnosed as having ‘non-specific chronic neck pain’. The study is small, with about 25 patients in each group, and although the self-experienced benefit rating from each of the groups was highest in the group with the 24 sessions of supervised exercise therapy and lowest in the group simply given a recommendation to exercise, no change was noted in objective measures, and all groups experienced some improvement.

Thus, there is still a lack of large, randomized controlled trials of treatment of chronic neck pain. The most optimistic approach seems to be that which includes changing illness behaviour. Indeed, the exact form of the exercise component may be less relevant. Waling et al41 showed in a group of 103 women with chronic neck pain, that three very different exercise approaches (strength, endurance and co-ordination) led to similar outcomes in pain reduction, leading the authors to conclude that the type of exercise is less important than the fact that the patient is exercising.

7.2. Radiofrequency neurotomy 

After utilizing placebo-control and then comparative anaesthetic responses in a small, poorly defined group of subjects, Lord et al42 were able to screen patients to find 24 that had relief of pain with diagnostic blocks of the nerve supply to specific cervical facet joints. These 24 subjects were then randomized to receive either radiofrequency neurotomy of the nerve supply to the affected facet joint or a sham procedure (12 patients in each group). A total of six subjects in the control group and three in the treatment group failed to have benefit from the procedure. At 27 weeks, only one control subject had persistent relief of pain after the procedure, compared to seven of 12 subjects in the active treatment arm. The problem is that 10 of the 12 control subjects were in litigation, compared to only four of the treatment-group subjects. If litigation status has any substantial effect on response to therapy, this is a significant confounding variable in a small study where confounders cannot be readily discounted. In a larger, though uncontrolled study, Sapir et al43 treated 46 subjects with radiofrequency neurotomy for so-called facet joint pain, and at 2 weeks after the procedure the majority of subjects had a 50% or more reduction in neck pain. Of course, without a control group the level of true effectiveness of the procedure itself is difficult to interpret. And that is the extent of trials of radiofrequency neurotomy for neck pain. The lack of sufficient data limits the clinician's ability to recommend this invasive procedure. There is only one placebo-controlled trial to date, and that one had a major confounder in the control group.44

7.3. Bugs and drugs 

Botulinum toxin A has had many applications, and one of the more recent to be studied is in the treatment of chronic neck pain. Wheeler et al45 have reported a placebo-controlled study of 50 subjects with neck pain of at least 3 months duration, about half of whom related their neck pain to motor vehicle collisions. One randomized group received botulinum toxin A by injection into cervical muscles, while the control group received saline injections. Both groups showed significant improvement at various follow-up times over 4 months, the authors thus concluding that, given as a single set of injections, the toxin was not beneficial for chronic neck pain.

As whiplash patients often report sleep disorder, a placebo-controlled trial of melatonin for subjects found to have delayed melatonin secretion onset has been completed.46 A total of 80 patients, with chronic neck pain on average about 2 years duration, were randomized to receive either melatonin tablets or placebo daily for 4 weeks. After 4 weeks, although the melatonin secretion onset time had changed, there was no clinical effect clarify reported quality of health as measured by SF-36, nor any effect on cognitive test results, but those in the treatment group fell asleep earlier and wokeup earlier. Joy.

7.4. Cognitive therapy 

There is a lack of studies to address the benefits of cognitive therapy in chronic neck pain patients, although there does appear to be some benefit in conditions like chronic low back pain and fibromyalgia. While this may be worth studying in chronic neck pain, this is an expensive form of therapy with high personnel demands.

7.5. Summary 

Although the general impression of therapy for either acute or chronic neck pain is that rest makes rusty and exercise is better than other prescribed therapies, it is clear that unproven therapies are still frequently prescribed. As such, the medical community needs to revise their approach. Although there are not enough studies to convince physicians and society in general that exercise – and less rather than more therapy – is the best approach, the traditional approach thus far of ‘healing an injury or a disease’ is failing us. As such, the philosophy must change.

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8. Paradigm shift 

One way to change our approach is to look at the factors known to affect the outcome from acute neck pain, and study and utilize an approach that directly addresses those very factors. Previous neck pain episodes, for example, have an effect as a poor prognostic factor for the outcome (development of chronicity) in future neck pain episodes. This is either for some physical reason or is due to the effect that previous experience has on future illness behaviour, or both. It may be tempting, even for physicians, to assume that there is an underlying physical basis to explain why previous neck pain episodes affect the outcome of future, distinct (in time) episodes. If there is a physical explanation, however, it is one for which we have no knowledge, and cannot direct us toward a helpful therapeutic approach. If, however, illness behaviour with future pain episodes is in part affected by one's past experience, then it seems intuitively correct that asking the patient about their previous experiences, and about the choices they made (whether to rest from normal activities and work, to wear a collar, to avoid exercise therapies and use passive therapies, to rely on medications primarily), is paramount in developing a change in this pattern of illness behaviour. That is something that can be done without even knowing exactly what the neck pain is due to. Patients may legitimately believe that all the previous therapy approaches were valid given that they were prescribed by someone as if they were meant to work. It should not be surprising to clinicians that patients not only follow their advice when given, but that they will do so again, unless given reason to do otherwise. Studies of the whiplash syndrome show that rest is harmful, while acting as usual is helpful. Collars are harmful, as are passive therapies versus active therapies. Patients need to be told all this so that they can ‘buy-in’ to the reason why the current neck pain episode need not follow on the pattern of previous episodes, and indeed, that previous episodes, because they were dealt with so differently, can be deemed irrelevant to what will happen with this current neck pain episode.

A high intensity of acute neck pain is also a negative prognostic factor. But we do not have any evidence that this is because of more severe pathology. So we should not tell patients that. We do have research which shows that how a symptom is perceived can be largely influenced by factors which generate symptom amplification such as viewing a symptom as having a more serious cause, excessive attention to symptoms by others, a pain diary, and any anxiety state. Although this has not been directly tested in the therapy for acute neck pain, the fact that advice to act as usual (as if the neck pain was benign in origin) leads to a better outcome suggests that how the patient views their pain, and how they respond to it, can be altered. Preliminary studies with the whiplash book support this notion.27 As mentioned above, Vendrig et al38 examined the effect of advice which specifically challenges a patient's views of the seriousness of their pain and the need to modify activities (mainly withdrawal from activities according to pain levels). This study found a high rate of success (return to work and normal function) in a group of patients who had been totally disabled with high pain levels for more than 6 months. The authors admit that the patients have to be willing to consider and act on this advice, but that is the whole point: choices patients make have an effect on their outcome.

Beyond this, we need to ask ourselves why neck pain in the occupational and motor vehicle collision setting is viewed, as Cote et al found4, as a more necessary reason to seek health care. We thus need to concentrate, in addition, on more system-wide, cultural factors that influence this behaviour.

Adding to this approach, one must at some point ask ‘Why has this person developed this behaviour now?’. People have pain episodes during many phases of their life. What causes them to behave differently on this occasion? A study reported recently by van der Windt et al47 indicates that general psychological well being rather than specific somatic symptoms predicts health care seeking. Often, one can find a series of life stressors predating the illness, or an associated detrimental event (like engaging in litigation) that is magnifying the abnormal behaviour in the first place. Although the patient may be reluctant to pursue these issues, if the physician is first clear with the patient that the symptoms are legitimate, and have various physical sources, then the psychological sources of symptoms may also be accepted as part of the clinical picture to be dealt with. The bottom line is that neck pain does not end there. Physicians need to appreciate that most individuals with neck pain do not attend a physician, so those who do are different in some way. Also, those who attend physicians do so in part because this particular occasion of neck pain is either associated with a ‘special event’ (e.g. a motor vehicle collision) or because the patient's current psychological well-being is poor, and this is what really makes them seek our help.

‘When the mind suffers … the body cries out.’

(Cardinal Lumberto to Don Michael Coleone in Godfather III).Box 1Box 2

Box 1. Practice points

•most people with acute neck pain do not seek medical attention, but those who do account for significant health care costs, second (among musculoskeletal disorders) probably only to low back pain in this regard

•those who seek care for acute neck pain are more likely to have experienced their pain at work or after a motor vehicle collision, and are more likely to have poor psychological well being

•most patients with neck pain will not be given a precise structural or pathological diagnosis but will instead be labelled as soft-tissue injury, whiplash injury, soft-tissue rheumatism, myofascial pain, mechanical neck pain etcetera

•reviewing a patient's past experience with neck pain (trying to understand how they approached treatment previously) and their current habits of pain diaries, or attending multiple therapists, may be important in providing the education and reassurance needed to alter past illness behaviours

•do not tell patients that the finding of disc degeneration on X-ray is relevant to their pain. It has nothing to do with their pain, is normal for them, and does not predict their outcome

•rest makes rusty

Box 2. Research agenda

•more research is needed to address the finding that the finding that the variance in outcome for acute neck pain can be accounted for by factors such as anxiety, expectation of chronicity (fear of disability), and pain diaries

•studies are needed to test interventions that alter illness behaviours or habits, such as advice to avoid pain diaries, to not withdraw from activities, and to exercise despite initial discomfort and fears, not viewing hurt the same as harm

•given the success of ‘The Back Book’ as an educational intervention, a trial of The Whiplash Book is clearly warranted

Back to Article Outline

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PII: S1521-6942(02)00097-9

doi:10.1016/S1521-6942(02)00097-9

Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology
Volume 17, Issue 1 , Pages 57-70, February 2003

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