Yuki Nishi, a doctoral student at Kio University, and Shu Morioka, a professor at the same university, said that in patients with chronic low back pain, the variability and stability of the trunk during walking become abnormal, which is more pronounced in the daily living environment. It was clarified that it would be.
Previous studies have shown that patients with chronic low back pain have abnormal trunk variability and stability during standing and lifting movements.However, since abnormal trunk movement control during walking was not clarified, in this study, we asked patients with chronic low back pain to wear a wireless accelerometer as an index for trunk control during walking. From the acceleration data, the SD and multiscale entropy between the strides on the front-back axis and the left-right axis, and the maximum Riapnov index were calculated.
In addition, in the conventional research on the motor control of low back pain, it was investigated only in the prepared experimental environment (outpatient rehabilitation environment), and it was not measured in the daily living environment where low back pain actually occurs. Measurements were performed in the outpatient rehabilitation environment and daily living environment, respectively, and the trunk control during walking was evaluated.
As a result, it was found that in patients with chronic low back pain, variability in the left-right axis and instability in the anterior-posterior axis increased, which became more prominent in the daily living environment.Furthermore, it was found that these gait control abnormalities correlate with pain, fear, and quality of life only in the daily living environment.This suggests that the outpatient rehabilitation environment alone may not be sufficient to fully understand the pathophysiology of motor control in patients with chronic low back pain.
It can be said that this study clarified the importance of qualitative evaluation of walking in the daily living environment in preventing the exacerbation of low back pain and grasping the pathological condition.
