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Most Women Have Back Pain In Pregnancy

Pregnant women carrying a male foetus may be more liable to back pain towards the end of pregnancy than those with a female foetus.

This was an unexpected finding of a seven-centre study carried out by researchers in Rome, Italy, which otherwise found that more than two-thirds of women have some degree of back pain in the last eight to nine weeks of pregnancy.

The researchers used the Italian validated version of the Roland questionnaire, a disease-specific patient-oriented questionnaire about low back pain. Until this, few studies on back pain in pregnancy had used validated patient-oriented tools.

Clinical data about both the period before all pregnancies and before the current pregnancy were acquired from 76 women. Nearly two thirds (n=47, 61.8 percent) of the women had had at least one previous pregnancy.

The study found that 24 (31.6 percent) of the women had no back pain during their eighth and ninth months of pregnancy. About 40 percent scored from 1-4, about a fifth scored 5-10 and eight percent scored more than 10.

A history of back pain and sciatica before the pregnancy were associated with back pain symptoms before childbirth. Back pain was not associated with previous pregnancies, however. Nor was the Roland score related to weight before pregnancy or to increasing weight during pregnancy.
European Spine Journal 2002;11:272-275 "Patient-oriented assessment of back pain in pregnancy"

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