[Prevalence of life-time back pain in Iran: a systematic review and meta-analysis]

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, Back pain as a multi-causal phenomenon is considered a major problem in most communities. It may be caused as a result of psychological, social and ergonomic factors. There is no precise statistical report on the prevalence of back pain in Iran. The aim of this study was to estimate the life-time prevalence of back pain in Iran using systematic review and meta-analysis. Twenty research papers on the prevalence of low-back pain using "back-pain prevalence" as the key words were obtained from the databases such as Magiran, MEDLIBE, SID, Google scholar and databases in English such as Pubmed and Scopus. Data analysis was performed by using meta-analysis [random model effects]. Heterogeneity among the studies was assessed by means of I[2] test. The estimated prevalence of life-time back pain in our study with a sample size of 5670 patients obtained from 20 papers was 51%[95% CI 40.1-61.8]. Prevalence of lifetime back pain among the medical staff with an average of 54.6% [95% CI 42.9-66.3] was more than the prevalence of other social groups. The highest and lowest prevalence rates of back pain were observed in Mazandaran Province and southern parts of Iran, with an average of 84/1% and 13%, respectively. The highest prevalence rate was observed in the age range of 15 to 45 years with an average of 54.2% [95% CI 6.42-65.9]. The results of this study indicated that back pain must be considered a social problem. Therefore the health authorities are expected to inform people through the mass media in order to prevent back pain and decrease its prevalence