"Cross-sectional" study of low back pain among workers at an industrial enterprise in Russia.

STUDY DESIGN: A representative sample of 18- to 65-year-old workers from a machine-building factory was studied using a standardized questionnaire. OBJECTIVES: To study the prevalence of low back pain syndrome among workers at an industrial enterprise and to estimate the association between low back pain syndrome and certain factors. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study of 800 workers (400 men and 400 women), who were invited to participate in the study. Seven-hundred-and-one (87.6%) persons took part in the study--339 (84.7%) men and 362 (90.5%) women. RESULTS: The life-time prevalence of low back pain complaints was 48.2%. The prevalence during the last year was 31.5%, and point prevalence was 11.5%. The number of patients with low back pain complaints increased with age. The duration of a low back pain episode was less than 2 weeks in 88.2% of the patients, and more than 12 weeks in only in 1.8% of the patients. Analysis of some social, individual, and professional factors revealed associations between low back pain and low level of education, marital status, absence of sports activity, intensity of smoking, and frequent lifting and bending during the work day. CONCLUSION: Our study revealed a high prevalence of low back pain among workers at an industrial enterprise. This low back pain was primarily of an acute nature.

[Use of functional classes to assess the status of patients with severe heart failure]. / Ispol'zovanie funktsional'nykh klassov v otsenke sostoianiia bol'nogo s tiazheloi serdechnoi nedostatochnost'iu.

The possibilities of the classification developed by Lang, Strazhesko, Vasilenko and that of heart failure functional classes, which has been adopted by the New York Heart Association (NYHA), to evaluate the status of patients with severe heart failure are compared in this communication. A total of 1619 patients with Stages IIB-III heart failure of various origin (coronary heart disease, dilated cardiomyopathy, rheumatic heart disease, myocarditis, primary pulmonary hypertension) were studied. To assess the patients' status the attending physicians used 7 grades: (1) satisfactory; (2) close to moderate; (3) moderate; (4) close to severe; (5) severe; (6) close to critical; (7) critical. Each patient was independently evaluated for grade and functional class by experts by using a specially developed schedule. An analysis of the distribution of the patients by grade and functional class demonstrated that the 4-graded functional class classification has advantages over the 7-graded one due to more settled, reproducible, recurrent and less scattered opinions (in case of the common source of information), the functional class, unlike the grade, was found to be unassociated with the nature of the disease. A simple grade summing-up (regrouping the patients from 7 to 4 grades) unenables one to adequately go over to the NYHA functional class. It is concluded that the tested NYHA classification should be used to evaluate the status of patients with severe heart failure.