Efficacy Of Interlaminar Epidural Injection With or Without Steroid For Low Back Pain Due To Lumbar Canal Stenosis: A Randomised Double Blind Study.

Spinal canal stenosis is the narrowing of the spinal canal which results in spinal cord and spinal nerve compression. It can cause  back and leg pain, limb weakness, and numbness. Patients with symptomatic spinal canal stenosis have reduced activity which further leads to development of other serious complications.

The cause of the disease is generally degenerative. Acquired spinal canal stenosis is very common among elderly patients, with a prevalence of 1.7% - 13.1%.Primary treatment is conservative management, but in many cases when conservative therapy is not effective then surgical treatment is selected. But even after surgery symptoms may persist and long term benefits of surgery is reported to be less compared to conservative management. The risk of anesthesia and postoperative complication is also increased in elderly patients.

An epidural steroid injection is a non-operative minimally invasive procedure used for pain relief in spinal canal stenosis. The main aim is providing effective and long lasting pain relief with improvement in functional status for the management of chronic back pain and lower extremity pain. Various studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of this treatment in the management of patients with spinal canal stenosis with highly variable success rate, still there is no consensus on its effect size nor on the timing of the trial, frequency, and duration of treatment. So further studies are required to understand the effectiveness of epidural steroid injection in the treatment of spinal canal stenosis.

Therefore this study is planned to evaluate the efficacy of interlaminar epidural steroid injection for back pain due lumbar canal stenosis.