Back Pain in Children Increases With Age: New Study

A new study presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) fills a gap in the research on back pain in children and adolescents.

The study, “The Epidemiology of Back Pain in Children and Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study of 3,669 American Youth,” has not yet been published.

“While adult back pain has been widely quantified and studied, there has been little research looking into similar effects on children and adolescents,” said Peter D. Fabricant, M.D., M.P.H., orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. “We know that it’s a real issue affecting kids and this study allowed us to collect a vast amount of data and provide a high-level analysis. Now we can use these results to further study specific activity-based, physiological, and psychosocial contributors to back pain in this population.”

Among the findings of the research reported by the authors:

• “Of the cohort, 33.7% (n=1,236) had some episode of back pain in the previous year and only 40.9 % of this group sought treatment such as physical therapy (44%), massage therapy (33.9%) and chiropractic treatment (34.1%).
• Females reported more back pain (38%) compared to males (29%) in the previous year and, among both groups, lumbar back pain was the most common at 68.9%.”

Dr. Fabricant commented to OTW, “Back pain is common in children and adolescents, and the incidence of children who experienced pain in the past year increases linearly with age (about four % for each year of age). While back pain is common in children and adolescents, it very rarely requires invasive treatment such as injections or surgery, as less than 5% (n=23) of the 40.9% who sought treatment needed surgical or procedural intervention.”

As for why females had more back pain than males, Dr. Fabricant told OTW, “We aren’t sure, and this study wasn’t designed to determine causation, only to report the epidemiological trends of back pain.”