(Reuters Health) - Home care workers may experience fewer bouts of low back pain if they use lumbar supports, according to the first study to evaluate the devices in this setting.
"Low back pain is a major problem among home care workers," Dr. Pepijn D.D.M. Roelofs of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health. The current study suggests that for home care workers who suffer from recurrent low back pain, the addition of lumbar supports to a short course on healthy work habits may curb episodes of low back pain.
While workers frequently use lumbar supports to prevent low back pain, there has been very little research on the effectiveness of the supports.
Roelofs and colleagues had 360 home care workers, whose jobs included housekeeping or helping with personal care in people's homes, take a course on healthy work habits. Half were also assigned to the lumbar support group, and were told to use the supports on the days when they expected they might experience pain. Study participants chose from four different adjustable elastic supports widely available in the US and Europe.
After a year, the researchers found, people who used the supports had about 53 fewer days of low back pain than those who did not use back supports. There was no difference between the groups in the amount of sick leave taken. This may have been because sick leave time was high, and a larger study sample would have been necessary to identify any difference, Roelofs said; it's also possible that low back pain isn't an important contributor to sick leave time.
More research is needed to see why some workers use the devices and others don't, and to understand how lumbar supports actually work to prevent pain, Roelofs and colleagues say.
"Nevertheless, low back pain remains a major problem in industrialized countries, and lumbar supports may be a valuable addition to secondary prevention in the workplace," they conclude.
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