Back pain surgery results may be overrated.

The article reports that months following spinal surgery for back pain, patients remember their initial pain as worse than they rated it at the time, reports a recent study in the journal Spine. A research team, headed by Dr. Ferran Pellisé of Hospital Vall d' Hebron, Barcelona, Spain, concluded that studies relying on such after-the-fact ratings may overestimate the effectiveness of spinal surgery in relieving chronic back pain. The researchers studied before-and-after ratings made by 58 patients who underwent lumbar fusion surgery for chronic low back pain.