Smoking, Obesity, and Your Back

Back pain is hard to understand. It is also hard to predict who will get it, who will recover from it, and who will be disabled by it. The effort to better understand back pain is ongoing. Bit by bit medical researchers add to doctors' knowledge about back pain.

These authors looked at hospitalization and health records for more than 900 workers in Finland. Because Finland has a national health care system, the records could be studied over a long period of time. The records went back all the way to 1973! The idea was to see if certain types of back pain were linked to lifestyle factors such as smoking, weight, exercise, or alcohol use. All subjects had filled out surveys about their health, lifestyle, and jobs.

Seventy-five people in the study had been hospitalized for back pain. The authors also looked for specific types of back disorders. They found that heavy smoking and being overweight were linked to problems in the intervertebral discs. (The discs are the spongy, gel-filled cushions between the bones of the spine.) Being overweight also seemed to be linked to other types of serious back disorders. Surprisingly, workers who did desk jobs had just as many problems as workers who did heavy labor.

The authors sum up the theories of why smoking and obesity cause problems with intervertebral discs. They conclude that future studies need to focus on specific types of back disorders. Such specific research may be the key to fully understanding back pain.