The incidence of chronic low back pain on employment status in working adults in South Africa

Abstract

Low back pain has become one of the most influential musculoskeletal disorders of modern society. Exercise  has been shown to be very effective in the treatment of chronic low back pain. The goal of the study was to test the effect of two exercise intervention programmes (conservative or progressive-aggressive programmes) for 12 weeks on low back muscle strength as well as psychological factors in participants with chronic low back pain. In total 32 participants were recruited for the study and randomly assigned to two exercise groups.  However, due to medical and work related reasons a number of subjects dropped out. At the end there were 10 subjects in the conservative exercise group and 11 in the progressive-aggressive group. Statistically significant differences at the 5% level of significance were found at the post-test measurements between the two groups. The results from the present study indicate that both types of programmes have shown to be very effective in the treatment of chronic low back pain, but that an aggressive-progressive exercise programme may be slightly more effective than a more conservative exercises programme.

Keywords: Disability, chronic low back pain, absenteeism, working status