Effect of Statin Use on Low Back Pain Steroid Injections.

Low back pain is one of the most common complaints for physician office visits and is the most common disorder requiring interventional pain treatment in USA. Fluoroscopy-assisted transforaminal anterior epidural steroid injections (TAESI) are more commonly preferred for treatment of low back pain. Most of the time epidural steroid injections are supplemented with different analgesic combinations due to insufficient analgesia. Recent reports have revealed immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory activities for statins in vivo and in vitro. Statins have very recently been shown to alleviate neuropathic pain in the rat model. However, the impact of statin use on response to epidural steroid injections remains unknown and may well increase the effect considering the substantial anti-inflammatory properties. We thus tested the primary hypothesis that patients taking statins before and after the procedure will have lower VAS scores compared to patients not on statins. Secondarily we tested the hypothesis that statin users will have improved quality of life evaluated with Short Form 36 (SF 36).