Mr. Ren Fujii (Doctoral course) and Professor Shu Morioka of Kio University Graduate School evaluated the movement pattern of the trunk and pain-related factors during work movements for workers with low back pain, and controlled the movement of the trunk. It was clarified that "fear" affects the disorder.
During work-related movements, low back pain causes impaired motor control of the trunk.Its characteristic is the motion pattern of the upper trunk and the lower trunk in phase (the state in which the movements of the upper trunk and the lower trunk match spatiotemporally).This exercise pattern adversely affected the lumbar load and eventually resulted in a decline in work capacity, the cause of which was unclear.
In this study, we target workers without low back pain and those with low back pain, and quantitatively measure the movement pattern of the trunk in the movement of lifting a heavy object placed on the floor using a three-dimensional motion analysis device. ..As a result of the analysis, it was found that the degree of coincidence between the upper trunk and the lower trunk in the "scene of grasping and lifting a heavy object" under the condition of lifting the heaviest heavy object was high in the low back pain group.
Further analysis revealed that "fear generated during the motion task" had an effect on this in-phase motion pattern.In other words, it was suggested that the in-phase movement pattern is an avoidance behavior caused by pain-related fear, which limits the degree of freedom of movement of the upper-lower trunk.
The research group believes that in order to correct the in-phase movement pattern of the trunk, interventions that reduce the fear that specifically occurs during work performance are needed.In the future, longitudinal studies will be conducted to verify whether motor control disorders are improved by interventions that reduce motor fear.