سپیده لطفی

Background : Chronic non-specific low back pain is extremely common in the general population. Athletes are often at special risk for more serious  associated factors of low back pain, which are often sport-specific in their etiology. Aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate the epidemiology and  associated factors of chronic non-specific low back pain in male athletes of track and field in the national league.     Materials and Methods : A total of 63 individuals were randomly selected to enter the study. The mean age of the subjects with the standard deviation was 25.2±4.5. To investigate the disability due to chronic non-specific low back pain, Oswestry questionnaire was used. For the evaluation of the pain perception, the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was employed. Statistical analysis was performed using chi-square (χ²), spearman correlation and multiple linear regression at a significance level of 0.05. All statistical calculations were done using SPSS-21 software.  Results: Out of 63 subjects, 32 individuals (50.8%) had chronic non-specific low back pain. Of these, 29 subjects(46%)  had low disability and 3 subjects (4.8%) had moderate disability due to low back pain. None of the participants had  severeor very  severedisability. Pain perception measured using the VAS, had a mean of 35.4%. The most frequent cause of Chronic non-specific low back pain in track and field athletes was high-intensity training (26.7%, n=24), followed by training and activity location (21.1%, n=19) (x 2 = 64.88, p=0.000). The regression analysis showed a significant relationship between high-intensity training and Chronic non-specific low back pain among the mentioned athletes (p≤0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study shows a high epidemiology of Chronic non-specific low back pain in male track and field athletes, which requires serious attention. Additionally, high-intensity training and the location of training and activities were identified as key  associated factors in Chronic non-specific low back pain.