Background: Low back pain (LBP) affects 80% of people at some time in their lives. The Cochrane Back and Neck (CBN) Group has been housed in Toronto at the Institute for Work & Health since 1996 and has 85 reviews and 32 protocols published in the Cochrane Library. With the ending of the external funding in 2015, the CBN has had to find another institution to continue its activities.

Objectives: To provide an update of CBN activities.

Methods and Results: In the past 3 years, CBN conducted priority setting with organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines for LBP. CBN editors and associate editors published key methodological articles in the field of back and neck pain research. The methodological quality of CBN reviews has been assessed by external groups in a variety of areas, and the conclusions were that CBN reviews had higher methodological quality than non-Cochrane reviews. CBN reviews are included in 35 clinical practice guidelines for back and neck conditions. The 2018 journal impact factor of CBN is 11.154, which is higher than the 2018 impact factor for CDSR (7.755). CBN reviews ranked 4th among all 53 Cochrane revew groups in terms of Cochrane Library usage data. The most accessed CBN review was “Yoga treatment for chronic non-specific low-back pain” which had 9,689 full text downloads. CBN is active on Twitter with 3,958 followers.

Conclusions: As of April 1 2020, due to a continued funding shortfall, the editorial base of CBN will be transferred to the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group in Australia. CBN published many systematic reviews and made important methodological contributions to the field of spine research over the past 22 years of work with Cochrane.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: The Cochrane Back and Neck (CBN) Group has an editorial board composed of internationally renowned scientists, clinicians and consumers