Prevalence, patterns, and risk factors for endoscopy-related musculoskeletal injuries among endoscopists in Nigeria

Abstract

Introduction: Musculoskeletal issues are quite common among endoscopists especially considering the complexity of GI endoscopy with prolonged examination time. In particular, the combination of repetitive movements, long procedure time, high volume and setup of the endoscopy suite provide the basis for these health issues. Considering the increasing number of new endoscopic interventional and diagnostic procedures, ergonomics in gastrointestinal endoscopy has not been addressed to the same extent. There has been no study on musculoskeletal injuries among practicing endoscopists in Nigeria. This study was designed to study the prevalence, patterns and risk factors for endoscopy-related musculoskeletal injuries among endoscopists in Nigeria.
Methods: This was a nationwide cross-sectional questionnaire-based study in which practicing endoscopists in Nigeria were administered an online Google form. The questions on the questionnaire were adapted from the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ). The questionnaire also included social demographic variables. There were 66 respondents which included gastroenterology physicians and surgeons. Data was analyzed with IBM-SPSS version 25. Inferential statistics was done using chi-square with p-value set at 0.05.
Results: The Prevalence of endoscopy-related musculoskeletal injuries among endoscopists in Nigeria is very high. The commonest sites affected were the wrist/hands, lower back, neck and shoulders. These injuries prevented about one-third of the endoscopists from carrying out their normal activities while the injuries were severe enough to necessitate therapy in more than two-thirds of the respondents. The only statistically significant risk factor for endoscopy-related musculoskeletal injury was female sex.
Conclusion: Most of the endoscopists in Nigeria have not had any form of training on ergonomics. While most of the endoscopists adopted the correct posture while performing endoscopies, a significant number did not practice ergonomic timeout nor use the finger grip technique. Thus there was a knowledge gap as well as a practice gap. A proper ergonomic education is a key step in preventing endoscopy-related musculoskeletal injury.