Depression, anxiety major factors in neck pain

[LahoreEstate]

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The cause of neck pain is not just physical, doctors in Germany have shown. They say that psychological distress — particularly depression and anxiety — are closely linked to persistent neck pain.

When people with neck pain seek treatment, Dr. Martin Scherer told Reuters Health, “for successful long-term results, it is essential to consider psychosocial factors and to include them into therapeutic strategies.”

Scherer, at the University of Gottingen, and his associated studied 448 patients in Germany who had suffered at least one episode of neck pain. More than half of the subjects (56 percent) reported neck pain on the day they completed the questionnaire and 26 percent had constant neck pain during the past year.

Based on their responses to a standard assessment questionnaire, 20 percent of subjects were classified as having depressive mood, and 28 percent were found to be anxious, the investigators report in the journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.

According to Scherer and colleagues, individuals with depressive mood or anxiety were highly likely to have the highest levels of neck pain.

The results, the researchers say, suggest that the degree of neck pain is related to the degree of psychological distress. “To put it in other words,” they write, “the higher the pain level in patients with (neck) problems, the more attention should be paid to psychosocial distress as an additional burden.”

The findings, Scherer told Reuters Health, “underline that neck pain therapies are more likely to be (effective) if care for chronic patients is not only symptom-oriented but focuses on psychosocial factors that have been proved to be central for development and prognosis of neck pain.”

Computer use linked to neck pain

Computers may be more than a proverbial pain in the neck; using them for extended periods may actually cause or aggravate neck pain, at least in teenage schoolkids.

Among students enrolled in grades 10 to 12 at schools in Western Cape, South Africa, “there was a steady increase in the report of neck pain as the number of hours using the computer per week increased,” physiotherapist Leonie Smith told Reuters Health.

In 2006, Smith, at Stellenbosch University in Tygerberg, South Africa, and colleagues assessed duration of computer use and reports of headache and neck pain among 1,073 students (65 percent girls), who were 16 years old on average.

Nearly half the students (48 percent) attended schools that used computers, the researchers report in the journal ‘Cephalalgia’.

Of the students enrolled in schools with computer training, 43 percent used computers for 8.5 hours or more per week. The investigators noted similar duration of use in just 5.5 percent of the students enrolled in schools without computer training.

“No clear association could be found between high hours of computer use and the presence of headaches,” said Smith, despite common reports of headache among the students, and particularly female students.

By contrast, neck pain was more common among students who also reported longer hours of computer use, regardless of computer availability at school.

For instance, among the students who spent 5 or fewer hours using a computer each week, about 16 percent reported neck pain; among students reporting 25 to 30 hours of computer use a week, nearly 48 percent reported neck pain.

Smith’s team says their findings “have confirmed the need to educate new computer users (school students) about appropriate ergonomics and postural health.”

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