Pain may impair control of posture and stability
One page on PainSci cites Hirata 2011: Does Posture Matter?
PainSci commentary on Hirata 2011: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
Pain probably impairs a person’s ability to control their posture and stability. This small study (only 9 subjects) attempted to determine how much postural sway might occur when in pain, and found evidence that pain may be the cause of problems with posture and core stability … and not the result of it (which is a classic assumption about chronic pain).
“This article presents the acute responses to leg muscle pain on the postural control. This measure could potentially help clinicians who seek to assess how pain responses may contribute to patient's postural control and stability during quiet standing and after recovering from unexpected perturbations.” The study suggests that “people suffering from leg muscle pain are more vulnerable to falls.”
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Musculoskeletal pain impairs postural control and stability. Nine subjects stood as quietly as possible on a moveable force platform before, during, and after experimental pain in the right leg muscles. A moveable force platform was used to measure the center of pressure and provided unexpected perturbations. Lower limb muscle activity, joint angles, and foot pressure distributions were measured. Hypertonic saline was used to induce pain in the vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, or biceps femoris muscle of the right leg. Compared to baseline and control sessions, pain in the knee extensor muscles during quiet standing evoked: 1) larger sway area, greater medial-lateral center of pressure displacement and higher speed (P < .05); 2) increased sway displacement in the anterior-posterior direction (P < .05); and 3) increased electromyography (EMG) activity for left tibialis anterior and left erector spinae muscles (P < .05). Pain provoked longer time to return to an equilibrium posture after forward EMG activity for, and pain in vastus medialis muscle decreased the time for the maximum hip flexion during this perturbation (P < .05). These results show that muscle pain impairs postural stability during quiet standing and after unexpected perturbation, which suggest that people suffering from leg muscle pain are more vulnerable to falls.
PERSPECTIVE: This article presents the acute responses to leg muscle pain on the postural control. This measure could potentially help clinicians who seek to assess how pain responses may contribute to patient's postural control and stability during quiet standing and after recovering from unexpected perturbations.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.