Prevalence and Distribution of Musculoskeletal Pain Among Australian Medical Students
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PainSci commentary on Smith 2007: ?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.
It’s amazingly difficult to find hard data on the prevalence of musculoskeletal problems. However, this Australian study of medical students found that almost 90% of them had some kind of body pain problem, mostly in the neck, lower back and shoulders — and these are young people. It may not be an exaggeration to say that virtually the entire population of planet Earth has musculoskeletal pain!
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.
OBJECTIVES: Although musculoskeletal pain [MSP] represents an important issue for young people and adolescents, few studies have investigated these conditions among a cross-section of medical students.
METHODS: We conducted a questionnaire survey of MSP among 261 students from a medical school in tropical northern Australia during 2004.
RESULTS: We had a 97.3 percent response rate. The prevalence of MSP at any body site varied from 75.8 percent in the second-year students to 89.3 percent in the third-year students, most frequently occurring at the neck [52.8 percent], lower back [51.6 percent], and shoulders [46.5 percent]. When compared with males, female students were more likely to report MSP [3.4 times for neck pain, 2.5 times for upper back pain, 2.0 times for shoulder pain, and 1.8 times as for lower back pain]. Second-year medical students were only 0.4 times as likely to report MSP at either the neck, upper back, or any body site when compared to students in the other three grades.
CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our study suggests that MSP affects Australian medical students at reasonably high rates, although the prevalence, distributions, and correlations for these conditions do not appear to be uniform.
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:
- 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.
- Moderators of the effect of therapeutic exercise for knee and hip osteoarthritis: a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis. Holden 2023 The Lancet Rheumatology.