JOABPEQ was made for developing a new scientific outcome measure to revise the JOA scoring systems for low back pain. The Japanese Society for Spine Surgery and Related Research (JSSR) held the first working group meeting on June 2000, and finished and released it as new one of JOA scores on May 2007. The basic ideas were to be; 1) disease-specific, 2) patient based, 3) from the viewpoints of dysfunctions, disabilities, handicaps in the social life multi-dimensionally, and with evidence-based methods. The user's guide gives some instructions; 1) JOABPEQ consists of five factors; Low back pain, Lumbar function, Walking ability, Social life function and Mental health, and the range of the score for each domain is from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better condition. 2) Five severity scores should be used independently. Adding all or some of the five scores makes no sense, so do not try to total the scores.3) As the five severity scores are not confirmed to follow normal distribution, noarametric statistical tests should be used.
