Top Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of Chronic Back Pain
Chronic back pain is lasts more than 3 months. Its causes, symptoms and treatment options would therefore need to be analyzed for better understanding.About 80 percent of the adult population have at one point in their life experienced back pain in varying proportions, but what exactly makes back pain, chronic back pain. Chronic back pain is any acute pain that is not constant but which persists for long periods even after the treatment of an underlying condition like an injury. This pain is equally likely to affect either adult men or women especially those within the 30 and 60 years age bracket. It mostly affects the lower back areas of the human body.
Causes of chronic back pain
When evaluating the cause of the pain, it can be categorized as one arising from an identifiable pain generator or one from an unidentifiable pain generator. For instance, if a person suffered back injury like a torn ligament, it is said to being caused by an identifiable pain generator and that makes it easy to treat. However, it is common for the pain to persist even after treatment of the injury and at this point it is said to be arising from an unidentifiable pain generator making it difficult to treat.
An individual’s lifestyle may be seen as one of the main causes of chronic back pains. People in burdensome employment or those that don’t exercise regularly are more prone to chronic back pain than others. Structural spine conditions like spinal stenosis may also be an identifiable cause of persistent back pains especially if not detected early.
In some cases, a person may develop severe back pains with no clearly identifiable cause. This condition may be attributed to either the nervous system or post treatment syndrome. In some instances, the nervous system may send pain signals to the lower back with no clear tissue damage or injury to the back. In other cases especially after spinal injuries that result in surgeries, back pain may continue into the healing period and even after an individual is fully healed in what is commonly referred to as the failed back surgery syndrome.
Symptoms of chronic back pain
The major indicator that back pain is chronic is if it persists for more than three months. Nevertheless, common symptoms of chronic back pain include; severe pain that can at times prevent movement, severe muscle spasms, and pain that is only concentrated around the groin, upper thigh, and hardly being felt below the knee. This pain mostly starts after an activity, sudden movement, or when lifting heavy objects.
Treatment
Whether the pain is treatable depends on whether it results from an identifiable cause or not. Those arising from clearly identifiable causes are a little bit easier to administer medication for or prescribe surgeries in severe cases. Most of these cases respond well to medication and the pain ceases. On the other hand pain with no clear cause is hard to prescribe medication for. It requires thorough examination of the patient by a chronic pains specialist and the first step to treatment involves identifying the reason behind the nervous confusion
In most cases, patients experiencing chronic pains will be examined, problem identified, and treated. While being treatable is good news to patients it is advisable that they report these cases as soon as they are first felt.