Moderate disability has negative effect on spatiotemporal parameters in patients with chronic low back pain

Background: It is known that the patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP) has different spatiotemporal characteristics than healthy controls such as average speed, cadence, step and stride length parameters. CLBP is a heterogeneous phenomenon in terms of causing various level of disability.

Research question: Does disability levels make a difference on spatiotemporal characteristics of patients with CLBP?

Methods: 66 patients with CLBP and 32 healthy controls between the ages of 25 and 65 years participated to study. The patients who had neurological, orthopedic, cardiovascular, metastatic history excluded from study. Resting, activity and night pain and functional disability were evaluated with Visual Analog Scale (VAS), Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) respectively. The patients were divided into two groups according to their disability level: moderate and severe. Gait analyses were performed with Optogait treadmill-based photocell system (Version 1.6.4.0, Microgate, Bolzano, Italy). After two trials were done, the spatiotemporal characteristics recorded for one minute while patients walked their preferred speed on the treadmill. One-way ANOVA was used to compare these parameters among the perceived disability level (moderate, severe) and healthy controls.The level of significance was accepted as 0.05.

Results: Step length, stride length, and preferred walking speed were the parameters that differentiate the gait between healthy controls and patients with CLBP (p < 0.05). According to post-hoc analyses, moderate CLBP was identified as the group most different from the healthy controls (p < 0.05).

Significance: Results of this study describe how compensating mechanism were seen in CLBP subgroups. As opposed to expectations, an increase in disability would not create higher difference in spatiotemporal characteristics between healthy controls and patients with severe disability. We propose that patients with severe and moderate disability had different ways to normalize their gait.