I saw a study from Nigeria that said lifting doesn’t cause low back pain. I’m not really ready to accept a conclusion like that from a country with such a different culture from ours (I live in Germany). Are there studies from other countries that agree with this conclusion?

Everyone believes that lifting heavy objects or even lifting light to moderately heavy objects when done repeatedly can cause low back pain. But does it really? Or is it more a matter that the back pain would have happened anyway and it was just noticed for the first time while lifting?

These were the questions posed by a group of epidemiologists from seven different medical research institutions in Canada. Epidemiologists are researchers who collect data over time and look for trends. In this study, they reviewed studies already published in what is called a systematic review.

By systematically searching various medical libraries, health journals, and even unpublished reports they were able to come up with 2,766 different studies related to these questions. They used specific search terms such as low back pain, occupational setting, work place, and lifting to find what they were looking for.

Thirty-five (35) studies met the criteria they had set up before starting the search. As the search terms suggest, that criteria included studies written in English or French related to low back pain, occupational lifting, and cause of low back pain. Each study had to have at least 30 subjects for the findings to be statistically significant.

There were many details reviewed from these studies: types of lifting, amount of weight lifted, severity of back pain, and whether or not sick leave was used. There was a broad range of specific occupations studied (e.g., nursing, retail salespersons, heavy manual laborers, administrators). The studies were conducted in 16 different countries including Nigeria as well as the U.S., Sweden, Russia, South Africa, Denmark, China, Turkey, Canada, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and India.

When all the data was analyzed, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to show a direct causal relationship between occupational lifting and the development of low back pain. This is not to say there isn’t a direct cause and effect between lifting and low back pain — it just hasn’t been proven without a doubt yet.