A new form of therapy can help people with lower back pain to live a more active life, research has found.

Treatment options for chronic back pain have long been limited and offer only “small to moderate” benefits that do not last a long time.

Now, experts believe they have found a “novel” approach to helping sufferers with a talking therapy that is focused on educating and improving activity levels, according to a study published in the Lancet Rheumatology journal.

A trial involving more than 1,000 people with lower back pain found that a new form of therapy, called Cognitive Functional Therapy (CFT), improved participants’ quality of life and reduced the “disabling” effect of back pain.

The researchers, led by experts at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, found that CFT was more effective than the usual care given to back-pain sufferers and the benefits lasted for three years after treatment – when the study ended.

Typically, psychotherapists use various forms of established talking therapies to help people with mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression, or other emotional issues, from tackling stress to breaking bad habits.

But there is also now increasing evidence that it may be able to help people overcome pain or reduce their experience of it.

For some people, lower back pain is a one-off event that gets better with time, but for others it can become chronic and cause long-term issues, affecting their mental and physical health.

Most treatments for the condition have “small to moderate” effects that do not last for a long period of time, the experts said.