Healthy - Oct 2021 (Sampler)

“Muscles will fatigue if they’re not changing position often enough – so take movement breaks away from your desk every 30 minutes” I t starts with a twinge when you get o the sofa. Or a stop-you-in-your-tracks jolt as you bend down to put on your shoes. We’re talking back pain, that often mysterious a iction which is estimated to a ect 90% of people at some point in their lives. It’s the leading cause of disability worldwide and around 90 million working days are lost every year in the UK as a result of lower-back trouble. It’s this type of back pain that’s the most common, says orthopaedic spinal surgeon John O’Dowd, ‘followed by neck pain and then mid-back pain.’ Much of its prevalence is down to people living longer, but it doesn’t only crop up in later years. Recent gures fromMind Your Back (a national campaign to help people manage back pain) found that 64% of 18-29 year olds have had back pain in the last year thanks to many of us working from home, because our work environment may not be back-friendly, while longer working hours also mean we’re exercising less. The phenomenon has been dubbed ‘Covid back’ and it’s something that physiotherapist Tracy Ward recognises. ‘Even if you have good posture, muscles will fatigue if they’re not changing position often enough when you’re at a desk all day,’ she says. Ward advocates regular movement breaks away from your desk, ‘at least every 30 minutes.’ The stress of the pandemic may also cause people to feel back pain more acutely, saysWard, andmany of her patients are arriving with ‘psychological baggage,’ whether it’s anxiety about job security or childcare. While back pain can have a medical cause such as sciatica (an irritation of the nerve that runs from your pelvis to your feet), or a slipped disc WHY IS BACK PAIN SUCH A MYSTERY? Plent y of us exper ience back pain , yet i t can be tr icky to pinpoint a cause. Our exper ts explore what might be going on JOHN O’DOWD is a London- based consultant orthopaedic spinal surgeon, and clinical director of the RealHealth Institute in the Netherlands. johnodowd.co.uk THE EXPERTS TRACY WARD is a senior chartered physiotherapist at BMI Albyn Hospital, Aberdeen. She is also a Pilates teacher, providing online classes at freshlycentred. com WO R D S C H R I S T I N A Q UA I N E (where cartilage in the spine presses on a nerve), it’s often not possible to pinpoint the root, and this is diagnosed as ‘non-speci c back pain’. ‘The majority of people with back pain in this country have this diagnosis, and I certainly see a lot of them,’ says O’Dowd. ‘This is when the pain is not directly linked with a diagnosis that you can see on an X-ray or scan. We’ve been stuck with this wretched term for about 25 years and nobody really knows what it means. I would love it if we had more speci c diagnostic labels but we can’t abandon “non-speci c back pain” at the moment as we don’t have anything to replace it with.’ What’s the cause? There are some usual suspects linked to back woes, such as being overweight, smoking, stress and poor posture. But there are also some more surprising ones. Depression, for example, was found to be positively associated with back pain, in a 2017 study from the University of Toronto. A 2019 review fromUniversity of Warwick found that people with persistent headaches or persistent back pain are twice as likely to su er from both disorders. The researchers suggest the possibility of a ‘biological relationship’ between headache and back pain in some people and that the two could be treated in tandem. There could also be a diabetes link. In a 2019 review fromUniversity of Sydney, researchers found that people with type 2 diabetes have a 35% higher risk of lower back pain and a 24% greater risk of developing neck pain than those without diabetes. ‘Back pain is absolutely more common in diabetics,’ says O’Dowd. ‘Type 2 diabetes has a link with obesity and being less physically 28 healthy-magazine.co.uk