Definition
Yellow Flags are psychosocial factors associated with risk of the development of chronicity in patients/employees with low back pain. The increasing costs of chronic low back pain, despite advances in technological medicine, stimulated the search for new solutions to the problem of low back disability. They have more recently been subdivided into Yellow Flags (clinical factors), Blue Flags (occupational factors), and Black Flags (contextual factors), although there is a degree of overlap among them.
Characteristics
In New Zealand, the increasing costs of chronic nonspecific low back pain had become an unmanageable burden. This fuelled a new initiative (Kendall et al. 1997) designed to complement an available set of acute back pain management guidelines, with a psychosocial assessment system designed systematically to address the psychosocial risk factors that had been shown in the scientific literature...
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References
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Main, C.J. (2013). Yellow Flags. In: Gebhart, G.F., Schmidt, R.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Pain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_4889
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_4889
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