Back Pain Causes (Day 2)

We’ve been talking about back pain relief.

What are the causes of back pain?

We can choose to classify these in different ways.

1. By age

2. Due to trauma or acquired through various means. for example disease.

But before we classify back pain, let’s talk about the risk factors to developing back pain.

Risk Factors to developing Back Pain

The following will put you at risk of back pain:

• Obesity
• Manual labour
• Trauma
• Smoking. Did you know that smoking is a risk factor to various cancers? When there is a malignant cancer, it can spread to the spine and cause back pain. Do you have any of the risk factors mentioned? Are you doing anything about it?

Age and Back Pain

We talked about various ways we can classify causes of back pain, one is by age.

Back Pain in Young Adults

When back pain occurs in a young adult, it may be due to any of the following causes:

1 Disc disease. What are discs? I don’t mean CD discs but the discs in your spine. These are structures between the bones of your spine that serve as shock absorbers helping you in turning, twisting, bending etc

2. Another cause of back pain in a young adult is fractures though this may not be common.

3. Arthritis of the spine,

4. Instability of the spine and

5.Disease of the bone. Are you a young person who has back pain? How long have you had it?

Back Pain in Older Aged

For older aged people in. their late 40s and above, there are also some possible causes. These include:

1. Degenerative disease, what this means is disease of the bone that occur due to the effects of aging, as you know the bones will become weaker as one ages.

2. Another cause in older adults especially females is due to the effect of osteoporosis, a condition where the bones become weak and brittle and may even break.

3. A third cause is as a result of metastases. When cancers spread, they may spread to the spine and cause back pain.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Join me tomorrow as we talk about the more common types of back pain we have. This is Dr Gabby wishing you a great day. Stay healthy.