Physical examination for the diagnosis of lumbar radiculopathy due to disc herniation in patients with low-back pain and sciatica: a systematic review.

Of all patients with back pain, less than 2% will undergo surgery for a herniated disc in the lumbar spine. In back pain patients who also have leg pain (sciatica), doctors and therapists use a physical examination to estimate the probability that the pain is caused by a disc herniation, and to assist the selection of patients for imaging and surgery. We conducted a systematic review to summarize available information on the diagnostic value of different aspects of physical examination. We included 19 different studies in which a wide variety of tests were investigated, such as the straight leg raising test, absence of tendon reflexes, or muscle weakness. The results show that most individual tests carried out during physical examination are not very accurate in discriminating between patients who have, or do not have a herniated disc with sciatica. However, most of the studies were conducted in highly selected patients who had already been referred for surgery, and only one study was carried out in a primary care population. Furthermore, better diagnostic performance of physical examination may be expected when combinations of tests are used, including information from both the patient history and physical examination. However, more research is needed to investigate the performance of such test combinations.