There are a variety of reasons why your lower back could be causing you pain. For instance, your back could be hurting if you picked up a box the wrong way or spent too much time playing tennis. However, a new study reveals that the activities you perform at work could also be contributing to the pain in your lower back.
The Study’s Specifics
To come to this conclusion, researchers analyzed women who worked with the elderly in healthcare occupations. The participants were split up into two groups. The first group included those who didn’t have trouble with lower back pain and the second included women who struggled with chronic pain in their lower back.
Each participant was asked a series of questions about the tasks that they completed at work every day and asked about how often they dealt with lower back pain. Then, researchers were able to determine how likely it is that the women would develop back pain based on the number of patient-handling activities they performed each day.
At the end of this study, researchers concluded that the participants who suffered from chronic lower back pain at the beginning of the study were more likely to suffer from pain this region of their body as the number of patient-handling activities they were responsible for increased. However, this correlation was not seen in the women who reported that they did not suffer from lower back pain before the study began.
What You Can Do to Stop Back Pain
If you work in a healthcare environment, you should:
- Take special care of your back if you lift patients regularly
- Pay attention to how your back is feeling if you handle patients at work
- Avoid performing patient-handling activities more than 10 times per day
Even if you don’t work in a health-related field, talk with your doctor about how you can avoid injuries if you are worried about how the tasks you are expected to perform at work could be harming your back.