Prevalence of low back pain in female nursing students in upper Egypt : a cross-sectional survey

Abstract EN

Background : Low back pain has been shown to be an important health and socio-economic problem of occupational diseases.

Some authors in our locality have documented near to half (45 %) of our nurses having ongoing back pain.

Various risk factors have been documented such as work environment, manual handling, heavy lifting, repetitive work, and strenuous tasks.

Also, a history of back trouble, particularly if recent and prolonged, is highly predictive of new episodes of prevalence of the back problem in nurses.

So, if we can estimate the magnitude of the problem of low back pain in nursing students we can protect the future nurse from this syndrome.

Objective : to examine the prevalence of back pain among the nursing students at the Faculty of Nursing at Assiut University and determine its risk factors.

Methodology : A cross-sectional study employing self-administered structured Arabic questionnaires.

Subjects consisted a complete cohort of 466 female nursing students at the Faculty of Nursing, Assiut University.

The prevalence of back pain in low, mid, and upper back was determined.

Full clinical history and local examination of the back was performed in students who had positive back pain complaints for exclusion of other causes of back pain such as pelvic, or major skeletal deformity.

Result : the prevalence of back pain was 54 %.

There was no significant difference between students who had back pain and those who did not except for irregular menses.

Prevalence of back pain over 1 year (chronic) was 33.5% but acute back pain (less than one month) was 43.5 %.

Back pain affected upper (L1-3), mid (L4-L5) and low back (S1-coccyx) in 56.9 %, 33.4 %, and 10 % respectively.

There was no statistically significant difference between back pain and years of study.

Conclusions : overall, our study showed that back pain was more common among an Egyptian cohort than in other studies.

We also concluded that preventive strategies might be started before enrollment in the Faculty of Nursing, continued during the time of studies and continued after graduation from the Faculty by proper distribution of nurses to different Departments according to the medical history and examination of the back.