There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Objectives
This study aims to estimate the prevalence of low back pain (LBP) in Europe and to
quantify its associated mental and physical health burdens among adults in European
urban areas.
Design
This research is a secondary analysis of data from a large multicountry population
survey.
Setting
The population survey on which this analysis is based was conducted in 32 European
urban areas across 11 countries.
Participants
The dataset for this study was collected during the European Urban Health Indicators
System 2 survey. There were a total of 19 441 adult respondents but data from 18 028,
50.2% female (9 050) and 49.8% male (8 978), were included in these analyses.
Primary and secondary outcome measures
Being a survey, data on the exposure (LBP) and outcomes were collected simultaneously.
The primary outcomes for this study are psychological distress and poor physical health.
Results
The overall European prevalence of LBP was 44.6% (43.9–45.3) widely ranging from 33.4%
in Norway to 67.7% in Lithuania. After accounting for sex, age, socioeconomic status
and formal education, adults in urban Europe suffering LBP had higher odds of psychological
distress aOR 1.44 (1.32–1.58) and poor self-rated health aOR 3.54 (3.31–3.80). These
associations varied widely between participating countries and cities.
Conclusion
Prevalence of LBP, and its associations with poor physical and mental health, varies
across European urban areas.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute,
remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work
is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes
were made. See:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
History
Date
received
: 23
November
2020
Date
accepted
: 24
September
2021
Funding
Funded by:
The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission;
Award ID: NGSS-184-2015
Funded by:
FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000836, University of Liverpool;
scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.