Sitting less helps stop back pain from getting worse

Avoiding couches and chairs might be a good way of keeping your back pain from getting worse, new research suggests.

Finnish researchers found that when people with back pain sat even a little less each day, their pain was less likely to progress over the next six months.

"If you have a tendency for back pain or excessive sitting and are concerned for your back health, you can try to figure out ways for reducing sitting at work or during leisure time," advised study lead author Jooa Norha , of the University of Turku.

There's not been a lot of study into the effects of prolonged sitting on back health and back pain, Norha's group noted.

So, they asked 64 overweight or obese people with heart risk factors to reduce the time they spent sitting each day by 40 minutes. All of the participants were already battling some level of back pain when they entered the study.

After six months, "back pain intensity increased significantly more in the control group than in the intervention [less sitting] group in which back pain intensity remained unchanged," Norha's team concluded.

He said he wasn't surprised by the finding, which was published recently in the journal BMJ Open .

"Our participants were quite normal middle-aged adults, who sat a great deal, exercised little and had gained some extra weight," said Norha, who is a doctoral researcher and physiotherapist at the university. "These factors not only increase the risk for cardiovascular disease, but also for back pain."

Just how being more active curbs back pain isn't clear.

The Finnish team used MRIs to examine the participants' back muscles but "we did not observe that the changes in back pain were related to changes in the fattiness or glucose metabolism of the back muscles," Norha said.

He certainly advocates exercise to folks with back pain.

"It is important to note that physical activity, such as walking or more brisk exercise, is better than simply standing up," Norha said in a university news release.

More information

Find out more about back pain at the Mayo Clinic .

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