Chronic low back pain (LBP) is a common health problem with an estimated global prevalence of 23.2±2.9%. Health Utilities (HU) shows the expected remaining life time proportion of individuals to be alleviated of health condition of interest. This cross-sectioanal study underlines the convenience of HU for measuring illness severity and health economics evaluations of preventive and therapeutic measures that address chronic LBP or other pain-characterized diseases.

Chronic low back pain (LBP) is a prevalent health issue, with great potential for primary prevention. Health utilities (HU) indicate which dimension of their supposed remaining lifetime persons would hypothetically trade to be attenuate of a health condition of interest. A value of 0 stands for "choose to die instantly", a value of 1 stands for "not ready to trade any lifetime". This cross-sectional study intended to estimate HU for healthy and LBP participants and to explore whether HU for LBP is helpful indicators to validate preventive and therapeutic decision making.

A total of 32 LBP and 126 healthy participants were selected. Standardised LBP situations were dispensed to all participants, and HU values were estimated applying the time trade-off method.

LBP and healthy participants exhibited 0.93 and 0.90 Median HU values, respectively. Estimations were constant across illness severity ratings with a visual analogue scale (VAS and with HU; in the patients, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC)was 0.66, and in the healthy individuals the ICC was 0.61. Eight percent of subjects exhibited HU of 1. No statistically notable association was seen between HU and gender, income or age.

On average, participants selected a 7 to 10% smaller life expectancy to dodge LBP, but about 1 in 10 participants were not prepared to trade any life years. The outcomes showed absolute stability of HU due to the comparability of HU ratings between healthy and LBP participants, the measurement uniformity when examining VAS and HU ratings, and the absence of an association between HU and demographic variables. This emphasises the advantage of HU for estimating illness severity in comparative health economics assessments of preventive and therapeutic measures that tackle chronic LBP or other pain-featured ailments. Further analyses should concentrate on distinctive LBP intensities and derive stratified HU that indicates the division of pain intensity in the population.