ABSTRACT
The objective of this retrospective cross-sectional study was to estimate the 6-month prevalence and severity of low back pain and sciatica in a representative sample of an adult Mediterranean population. The study group comprised a sample of 674 adults aged 20 years or older from a mainly (74.8%) urban population. Information regarding low back pain and sciatica prevalence and severity and its related aspects, as well as socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, was collected by personal interviews with a validated questionnaire. The association between the intensity of low back pain and sciatica with several sociodemographic parameters was tested using ordered univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis.A total of 266 (39.5%) patients reported low back pain and 166 (24.6%) reported sciatica during the previous 6-month period. A woman living in a Mediterranean country reported low back pain of increased severity if she was a married housewife aged older than 65 years who was a smoker and suffered from depression. More severe sciatic pain was reported by working married women older than 65 years who were smokers.
Subject(s)
Low Back Pain/epidemiology , Sciatica/epidemiology , Adult , Aged , Cross-Sectional Studies , Female , Greece/epidemiology , Humans , Logistic Models , Male , Middle Aged , Prevalence , Young AdultABSTRACT
Delayed complications following lumbar spine fusion may occur amongst which is adjacent segment degeneration (ASD). Although interspinous implants have been successfully used in spinal stenosis to authors' knowledge such implants have not been previously used to reduce ASD in instrumented lumbar fusion. This prospective controlled study was designed to investigate if the implantation of an interspinous implant cephalad to short lumbar and lumbosacral instrumented fusion could eliminate the incidence of ASD and subsequently the related re-operation rate. Groups W and C enrolled initially each 25 consecutive selected patients. Group W included patients, who received the Wallis interspinous implant in the unfused vertebral segment cephalad to instrumentation and the group C selected age-, diagnosis-, level-, and instrumentation-matched to W group patients without interspinous implant (controls). The inclusion criterion for Wallis implantation was UCLA arthritic grade