![]() Low back pain is one of the most common reasons that people seek care. Often times this pain has no known original injury, or the “original injury” happened so long ago that it can’t exactly be blamed for the long term back pain that someone might be experiencing since. A commonly asked question by patients coming in to physical therapy for their low back pain is whether or not they need some sort of imaging- a radiograph (Xray) or MRI. Old Fashioned MedicineUntil recently, it was fairly common practice to obtain some sort of imaging of someone’s low back if they were experiencing pain. But in 2015 there was a study published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology (I’m sure you all got it, you all subscribe to this journal right? Ha!) that looked at MRI imaging in people without a history of back pain. The goal was to determine how common “abnormal” MRI findings are in people without low back pain. ![]() What this table tells us is that some “abnormal” MRI findings are really not so abnormal after all! Specifically, if we look at the first row- Disk degeneration- even by age 30, over half of people will have this finding on an MRI of their back despite the fact that they do not have low back pain. Even more interesting, if we look at the row for disk bulge, we can see that by age 40, half of the people studied had at least one bulging disk, without any pain! Scary?
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8/4/2021 01:30:20 pm
It's good to know that you can have abnormal MRI findings with low back pain. My sister has been struggling with lower back pain for the past couple of years now, and she was wondering what she should try to look into getting done to find out what the issue could be. I'll make sure to pass this information along to her so that she can look into getting an MRI for her back pain.
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AuthorsBob Cranny, PT |