ability and Depression in Patients With Chronic Low-Back Pain.

In your June 2011 issue, we found an interesting study by Farzanegan et al. entitled, “Effects of lumbar discectomy on disability and depression in patients with chronic low-back pain. ” (1). The authors demonstrated the beneficial role of surgery in chronic back pain for patients with dis-ability and depression. Patients with chronic back pain are usually also depressed (2). Evaluating these patients is difficult. Evidence is currently lacking to recommend op-timal methods to evaluate these patients. Farzanegan et al. used the Beck depression inventory to evaluate depres-sion and Rolland and Morris’s questionnaire to measure disability. These are simple, fast, and reliable methods for screening back pain in the general population (3,4). De-pression and chronic pain have been thought to worsen the prognosis of low-back surgery. Thus, patients with de