Melissa Clarke: Four million Australians suffer from recurring episodes of lower back pain. But Australian researchers have found an approach that reduces recurrence of back pain by 30% by staying on the move. Declan Gooch reports.
Declan Gooch: These days you wouldn’t know Peter Hancock struggled with back pain.
Peter Hancock: I’ve got an 80km run planned this weekend through Girraween National Park in Queensland. And then a fortnight after that some mates and I are going out to Menindee and doing a 100km run.
Declan Gooch: The Armidale man got into running on doctor’s orders.
Peter Hancock: I had back problems so I went to a physio and he gave me an exercise program to help fix the back. But he also told me that I needed to do something to strengthen the legs because the legs act as shock absorbers to the spine. So I just started running.
Declan Gooch: It worked. So he’s not surprised that groundbreaking research has just found walking is an effective way of reducing lower back pain. Mark Hancock is a physiotherapy professor at Macquarie University and the author of the study which was published today in the journal The Lancet. He says four million Australians experience lower back pain.
Mark Hancock: We know it’s the leading cause of disability globally so it has a huge impact on individual people’s lives but it also costs economies and their healthcare system a huge amount of money.
Declan Gooch: The study involved more than 700 adults who’d recently recovered from an episode of lower back pain. Some of them were assigned to an individualised walking and education program. Mark Hancock says the focus of the study was on preventing back pain from recurring.
Mark Hancock: In our study the average number of previous episodes people reported was about 30 or 40 previous episodes. So many people it’s a couple of episodes a year. So we found that we were able to reduce those episodes substantially by getting people on this program.
Declan Gooch: The combination of regular walking and education reduced the chance of debilitating back pain recurring by almost 30%. Participants also had a longer period in between recurrences of pain, almost 100 days more than the control group. Mark Hancock says researchers got the participants walking for about 30 minutes five times a week.
Mark Hancock: It wasn’t that long ago that we’re all told if you have back pain go to bed, lie down, rest and there’s a lot of fear, an understandable fear, you know associated with back pain. So patients really nicely in this study reported to us how it changed the way they thought about their back pain.
Declan Gooch: Nicolette Ellis is the chair of Chronic Pain Australia. She says avoiding physical activity doesn’t help those living with chronic back pain.
Nicolette Ellis: Most people think when they’re in pain it’s easier to avoid activity or to lay down and rest and hope that the body recovers. Unfortunately that’s the relative movement where hopefully we’re rehabilitating the body, the brain and the nervous system.
Declan Gooch: Nicolette Ellis says the medical system has historically done an average job of treating chronic pain which often has ambiguous causes.
Nicolette Ellis: What we’ve learnt over the last couple of decades is that MRIs and back scans and those types of things don’t really correlate with someone’s pain condition. It’s much more complex than that.
Declan Gooch: Researcher Mark Hancock says many existing treatments for lower back pain reflect a lack of research in the area.
Mark Hancock: Most of the exercise interventions were complex. They required people going to group classes, being supervised and really people weren’t accessing those interventions. So we’re really surprised nobody looked at walking and that’s why we did this study.
Melissa Clarke: Researcher Mark Hancock ending that report from Declan Gooch and Kathleen Ferguson.