Relationship between sarcopenia and low back pain in older adults – A cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging data

We propose to use the data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging to find out whether there is a relationship between the presence of low back pain and decreased muscle function in seniors. This research could provide valuable information allowing for the development of preventive and management strategies for LBP in older adults as a specific subgroup, and would thus lead to a decreased burden on the health-care system.

The analysis of the CLSA database was carried out as planned to test for the association between sarcopenia and low-back pain by looking at the prevalence of sarcopenia in adults older than 65 years with and without low-back pain, considering selected confounding factors/variables.

We found a one-year prevalence of low-back pain in older adults of 16.3%, with higher rates in women (18.5%), than men (14%). Regarding sarcopenia, the general prevalence varied through the different definition criteria with the lowest rate (1.0%) using the European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People criterion and highest (7.5%) according to the International Working Group on Sarcopenia. Independently of the proposed model, depressive symptoms and number of comorbidities were always associated with higher odds of having low-back pain. In the general model, appendicular skeletal muscle index adjusted by the body mass index ratio and gait speed were negatively associated with the odds of low-back pain in the past 12 months whereas presence of sarcopenia was associated with high odds of low-back pain in the model using the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) criterion.