Frequency of back pain occurrence among high school youth including their physical activity.

Background: Back pain diseases are among frequently reported health problems. Unfortunately, more often this problem also affects young people, high school students. Lifestyle that people are representing nowadays has a negative impact on their spine. Development of technology and transportation eliminates daily basic physical activity such as taking a walk to the school. Prolonged and inappropriate sitting posture during classes and using the computer at home are predisposing factors for back pain occurrence. The aim of this paper was to analyze the frequency of back pain occurrence among high school youth and attempt to relate their occurrence frequency with sex, time spent in sitting position, anthropometric parameters and physical activity of examined students.

Methods: The examined group initially counted 272 teenagers, but ultimately 218 were taken into account for the analysis and 54 questionnaires were filled in incorrectly and rejected. All of them were high school students. Customized survey consisting of general part and closed questions regarding physical activity (subjective experience of work load) was used as an examination tool.

Results: Examined youth spent on average 10.04 hours daily in a sitting position. As much as 195 (89.45%) of examined teenagers declared to experience back pain at least once in their lives. The most of teenagers (117; 53.67%) indicated lumbar spine pain. Girls more often felt spine pain issues in comparison to boys. Short stature of teenagers was often related to back pain occurrence. No correlation between time spent in sitting position and frequency of skeleton axis pain occurrence was noted. Among group of boys a relation between more frequent physical activity and less often spine pain occurrence was observed.

Conclusions: Spine pain is an important health problem of examined youth, occurring more frequent among girls than boys. Body height correlate negatively with frequency of spine pain occurrence among youth. Despite spending more than 10 hours daily in sitting position by examined youth, it did not affect the frequency of back pain issues occurrence. Higher physical activity of examined boys was related to less often back pains.