Smoking and Back Pain, Is There a Correlation?
It’s obvious that smoking is bad for you, in spite of what some of the tobacco companies may have said in the past. And as a doctor, I feel it is my duty to at least mention the known effects of smoking to my patients that do so, to at least attempt to sway them a little. Everyone that I know that smokes, wishes they could quit, but they just can’t ever seem to pull it off.
As a back pain doctor I am always asked whether or not I believe smoking affects the spine, does it cause an increased likelihood of back pain? The short answer to that is yes, I do. But, medical studies on the subject just never could quite pin smoking down as a potential cause. It makes sense when you think of the physiology of the disc, the fact that it lacks a blood supply and relies on fluid exchange from the blood supply to the bones above and below. You would logically think that a lack of oxygen in the system would affect the tissues without a blood supply first, right?
Well, a Finnish study recently published in the American Journal of Medicine has come to the conclusion that smoking is “modestly” associated with the risk of low back pain and the effects may be “at least partly reversible.” The Finnish researchers identified and reviewed 81 studies from around the world involving smokers, former smokers, or never-smokers and low back pain conducted between 1966 and 2009. Of those, 40 studies involving more than 300,000 adults and adolescents met the standards for the analysis.
They found that “Current smokers (adolescents or adults) are at only 31% higher risk of low back pain compared with never smokers but this estimate is only for low back pain for one day or more during the past 12 months,”
The research does suggest “the effects of smoking may be at least partially reversible,” since former smokers were less likely to seek care for low back pain than current smokers. However, more research into former smokers will be needed to make a more definitive claim.
So there you have it, at least some evidence of a cause and effect relationship between smoking and lower back pain. I know it isn’t ground breaking research, but it’s all I have.
