results of this study suggest that motor control exercises and graded activity have similar effects for patients with chronic nonspecific low back pain.

There is generally good evidence that pain management interventions that include self-management strategies can substantially reduce disability and improve psychological well-being in patients with chronic pain. Reductions in unhelpful responses, especially catastrophising and fear-avoidance beliefs, have been established as key contributors to these gains. In contrast, there is surprisingly little evidence that adherence to self-management strategies contributes to achieving these outcomes. Difficulties in defining and measuring the use of pain self-management strategies have been obstacles for this research. Using a pragmatic way of assessing the practice of specific strategies this study investigated their ability to account for changes in pain, disability and depressive symptoms after a 3-week cognitive-behavioural pain management program. The post-treatment outcomes on these dimensions were found to be statistically and, for many, clinically significant. Consistent with previous research, reductions in catastrophising and fear-avoidance beliefs, and increased pain self-efficacy beliefs, were also associated with these gains. But the key new finding was that there was a clear gradient between adherence to specific self-management strategies and reductions in pain, disability and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, adherence to the self-management strategies was predictive of better outcomes even after controlling for the moderating effects of initial catastrophising, fear-avoidance and pain self-efficacy beliefs.

Three weeks of stretch increases tolerance to the discomfort associated with stretch but does not change muscle extensibility in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.

The addition of IE to behavioural exposure did not improve outcomes. However, higher adherence to either attentional strategy was associated with larger effect sizes on all measures, suggesting factors shared by the two treatments could have contributed to the outcomes. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that increasing adherence to treatment strategies, possibly by motivational measures, would improve the overall outcomes of these interventions.