First published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 2007, 8:8 doi:10.1186/1471-2474-8-8
© 2007 Kulig et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Background
Altered spinal mobility is thought to be related to current or past episodes of low back pain; however evidence of that relationship in younger subjects has not been established. The purpose of this study was to compare lumbar segmental mobility in asymptomatic and symptomatic subjects during posterior to anterior (PA) manual spinal mobilisation and a self-initiated prone press-up (PU) maneuver. We hypothesised that persons with central low back pain would have an altered lumbar segmental mobility pattern compared to those without pain.
Method
Forty-five individuals (age 32.1 ± 8.5) with non-specific low back pain and 20 persons (age 31.1 ± 7.0) without low back pain participated. Each subject underwent dynamic imaging of the lumbar spine during a PA mobilisation procedure and while performing a PU. Segmental motion was quantified as the change in the intervertebral angle between the resti