Back Pain Causes

Injury -A sudden fall, car crash, or sports injury can cause a sprain or strain. When a back injury occurs, muscles, ligaments, and tendons become over-stretched and swollen up, causing pain, tenderness, and stiffness.

The three common causes of back pain include:

Muscle strains: Strained muscles, tendons or ligaments or inflamed joints may cause pain along your spine.

Osteoarthritis: This degenerative joint condition affects nearly everyone past the age of 60. Old age and injury can slowly lead to deterioation of the cartilage. Cartilage is the protective tissue that covers the surface of the joints of the vertebrae.

Osteoporosis: One in three women who are older than 50 can be affected by osteoporosis and this can lead to painful vertebral compression fractures.

What are the Triggering factors for Back Pain?

Triggering Factors -The episode of back ache might result either from a strenuous event or previous history. Even psycho-social risk factors like stress, distress, anxiety, depression, cognitive functioning, job dissatisfaction and mental stress can play a role in triggering back ache. There may be some deep underlying causes of low back pain, few of which include:

• Fracture of vertebral bones.
• Slipped disc; disc bulges out of vertebral joint and puts pressure on spinal nerves.
• Spinal stenosis; owing to narrowing of spinal space,pressure is induced upon the spinal nerves.
• Spondylolithesis; when one of the back bones slips forward and out of position.
• Degenerative disc disease; when the discs in spinal cord gradually gets worn out.
• Osteoarthritis; a wear-and-tear disease of bones.
• Rheumatoid arthritis; an inflammatory condition of joints.
• Carcinoma or benign tumors.
• Kidney stones.
• Endometriosis.
• Pelvic inflammatory disease in females.

Sometimes a routine activities such as gardening, picking up a child, reaching for an object or even coughing, driving can trigger back ache.