Causes of Lower Back Pains

Causes of Lower Back Pains

Back is the second most common reason for which a person visits doctors all over the world. 4 out of 5 americans face this problem once in their lifetime before they get old. We will put some light on what are the cause of lower back pains int his post. Aging, muscle imbalance and modern life style are some of the causes of lower back pains. Lets try to understand how these causes result in back pains.

How Back works?
To under what cause back pains, one should have a sound knowledge of how our back works. The back of humans is made of muscles which are interwoven in each other. The Spine of the human body is S shaped. The back muscles wrap around the S shape spinal column. The spine is
made up of 24 vertebrae connected to each other by facet joints. Between these vertebrae lie a shock absorbing material called inter-vertebral discs. These disc are filled with water and help in eliminating the shock which one might get after an impact or because of the movement of the back.

Aging Back Pain
The inter-vertebral discs are made of 80% water when we are born and can absorb more shocks. But as one grows older, the amount of water starts to diminish thus making our body more prone to pain from the shocks. It is fond that middle age person's inter-vertebral discs has 50% water left while a much older person has 20% water in the shock absorbing pads. Thus it is evident from the above the facts that aging is one of the cause of lower back pains.

Muscle Imbalance
It is also evident that the muscles around the spine should be in good balance shape to avoid back pain. When the muscles in front of pelvis are stronger, they tend to pull front of the pelvis down. As a result back of the pelvis goes a little bit up. It then becomes impossible to maintain the healthy spine shape and the change in shape increases the spine curvature. Thus the muscles in the increased curvature area are always irritated and stretched. This is another cause of lower back pain as these muscles ache when they come in action i.e when one does a activity which involves movement of these muscles.

Sitting in Chairs
Our body has been trained through all the past years of evolution to perform activities otherwise than eat, travel and sit in chair. Sitting in a cross legged position is a perfect alignment for the spine and maintaining flexibility in the hips area. This makes back pain less common in Asia as people still prefer sitting on the floor with cross legs for most of their activities. They sit on floor for their meals, for meetings and some people follow it for work a well.

Flexibility
It is important that should be very much flexible in hip, then only he or she can avoid back pain. But our modern life style of using the chair for each and every work that we perform results in putting stress on spinal disc and results in problems like cramps and weakens our back muscles thus reducing the hip flexibility.

Life Style
A balance posture is a key to pain free back. A group of cells called proprioceptors send data to the brain regarding the proper position and alignment of muscles. When we are not balanced the brain is therefor able to tell us that we should get in proper posture. However in today's stress filled life style we often tend to ignore these signals. A prolonged ignorance can thus result causing lower back pain.