Vinodkumar Balakrishna Pillai Padmakshiamma
BACKGROUND Low back pain is the second most common symptom related reason for clinician visits in the United States. Up to 84 percent of adults have low back pain at some time in their lives. Low back pain poses an economic burden to society mainly in terms of the large number of work days lost by a small percentage of patients who develop chronic back pain. Lifestyle diseases are defined as those problems that evolve due to changes in lifestyle. The contributing factors are bad food habits, physical inactivity, wrong body postures, habits and personality including sleep and disturbed biological clock. Spinal disorders contribute to loss more than 20 million of productive life years. Wrong sitting and standing posture while working gives stress to backbone and leads to chronic backache. Regularly spending a lot of time in front of computer may also lead to muscular pain of neck and back. People who lift heavy weight are predisposed to disc diseases and sciatica. In this background this study was conducted to
1. Determine the obesity as a risk factor for back ache
2. Find out other factors that contribute to backache.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Study Design- Case-Control Study.
Study Period- April 1, 2014, to March 31, 2015.
Study Site- KMCR, Al-Malaz, Riyadh, KSA.
All persons coming to Orthopaedics OP during the study period with back pain both males and females for the first time constituted the cases and a person coming to orthopaedics OP without backache
Exclusion criteria- Acute trauma with RTA and fall.
Data was collected by self-administered structured questionnaire and personal examination and investigation evaluation.
Software support- Excel, SPSS
RESULTS
1) BMI with OR (odds ratio) 4.85(p=0.000, 95%; CI 2.30-10.19); 2) Stress-OR=2.82(p=0.002, 95%; CI 1.45-5.50); 3) Personality-OR=2.94 (p=0.003, 95%; CI 1.45-5.96).
The other factors tested having OR more than one were-1) Age, OR=1.15; 2) Exercises, OR=1.24; 3) Existences of co-morbid conditions, OR=1.21; 4) Smoking, OR=2.02; but shows no statistically significant difference.
CONCLUSION
People with BMI more than or equal to 30 has 5.57 times more chance to contract backache. Similarly, stressful persons had 3 times and having type A personality had 4times higher chance to get back pain and its sequelae. People having disturbed sleep was also have 3 times higher risk. People having regular exercise were protected from backache. The other risk factors were age, gender, co-morbid conditions, but this study could not prove a statistically significant difference. The most common spinal disorder anatomically was thoracolumbar spine disorders (39.4%).
