Spinal column deformities in patients with lumbar pain.

Abstract

Introduction: Lumbar pain is one of the most frequent painful conditions of the modern human being and becomes a serious healthy, social and economic issue. Objective: To demonstrate the distribution of frequency of the deformities of the spinal column as well as to establish the difference in terms of the outcome of the therapy treatment given to the patients with low lumbar pain. Methods: The study has covered 200 patients with low lumbar pain, treated with medical and physical therapy that, according to the given therapy, were divided into two groups and examined before and after completion of the treatment. Oswestry Index was used for assessment of disability caused by lumbar pain. As for assessment of the deformity, visual approach for identifying the functional status of sagittal and frontal plane was used, as well as X-ray images. Results: The patients were with an average age of 53.8 years, most of whom were females (62 %). About 43.5 % of them had job that does not require physical activity; 29 % of them having a job position that mostly involves seating, 20 % of them physical activity and 7.5 % of them had job that requires standing, whereby they have normal body weight, BMI (22.6). 72 % of the patients had deformity of the spinal column, to whom the applied physical therapy gives 3.5 times better results in comparison with the results of medical therapy X2 = 14.286 (p<0.05). Conclusion: The high percentage of presence of deformities indicates that they represent risk factor for occurrence of the lumbar syndrome, requiring special attention during prevention and timely medical treatment of the same, by introduction of special physiotherapy programme at schools and work post.