Evidence suggest that low back pain is not  a one size fits all condition. It is comprised of heterogenous subgroups which respond to specific  appropriate interventions as described by the developers of various classification schemes. Classifying low back pain into homogenous subgroups reduces treatment invariability and likelyhood of treatment failure. This practice significanlty minimizes the risk of chronicity amongst individuals with low back pain in the acute stages.

Some patients with LBP  do not recover completely. These patients often develop persistent pain and disability over time and they become difficult to manage.  Persistent chronicity result into patient’s dissatifaction and poor treatment outcome.  This is a common encounter among patients presenting with LBP.  It is evident that, assessment and clinical sub-classification often leads to accurate diagnosis, appropriate treatment intervention thus improved treatment outcomes.  Therefore, this study is aimed at classifying patients presenting with LBP into different clinical sub-groups, and to determine the levels of risk of chronification among patients in the different clinical subgroups at the Physiotherapy outpatient clinics at Muhimbili Orthopaedics Institute (MOI) and Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH) in Tanzania.

In this proposed study, the researcher will include all adults presenting with LBP < 3 months since its onset. During data collection process, participants will be provided with the Participant’s information sheet containing aim of the study, study procedure, potential benefits and protection of confidentiality.  Also, they will be provided with consent forms to sign after they have read and understood the study.  The researcher shall assure to keep participants’ confidentiality and participants will be allowed to decline or terminate their participation at any point during the study.  Likewise, all participants will be provided with socio-demographic characteristics questionnaire, prior to commencement of the clinical assessment. Thereafter, patients will enter the examination room, where the investigator will take history of the condition, map the symptoms on the body chart and classify LBP using the diagnostic checklist.  Also, the investigator will assess the levels of risk in each identified clinical subgroup of LBP into high, medium or low risk of chronification.

After the sample size is achieved, the researcher shall consolidate all completely filled in questionnaires and assign serial numbers to each. This shall be followed by identification of the key variables such as socio-demographic characteristics, clinical characteristics, LBP clinical subgroups and levels of risk of chronification.  The responses from the questionnaires, will be assigned numerical values before being entered into the Microsoft Excel spread sheet. The descriptive statistics will be interpreted into means, frequencies and percentages.  Later on it will be presented in tables and charts. Also bivariate analysis using the Chi-square statistical test will be performed to test the relationship between the different clinical subgroups and the risk of chronification.  Results from this statistical test will be interpreted at 95% CI and the level of significance (p value ≥ 0.005) will be considered statistically significant.