The total number of low back pain patients selected was 334. Out
of these, 184 were excluded for a variety of reasons, and thus 150
patients were included in the study and evaluated. Among these,
fifty were allocated by randomization to group 1 (TENS), fifty to
group 2 (IFC) and fifty to group 3 (controls). Thirteen patients
(8.66%) gave up during the treatment, of whom six (12%) were
in group 3 (2%). Thus, 137 patients completed the treatment protocol
(Figure 1).
Table 1 shows the demographic features of the population
included in this study according to group allocation. Only the
initial pain intensity differed significantly between any of the
groups (only between groups 1 and 3) (P = 0.0086), at a significance
level of 5%.
Independent of group allocation, comparison of patient
characteristics between individuals who finished the treatment
protocol (n = 137) and those who did not (n = 13) using one-way
Anova and the Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there was no statistically
significant difference between these groups (Table 2).