Study of physical activity and pain in the spine area in university employees with musculoskeletal disorders

INTRODUCTION: Prolonged sitting at the workplace and reduced physical activity outside of working hours represent a risk factor for the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorders among office workers.AIM: With a focus on the prevention of the health of workers in the field of higher education, we set ourselves the goal of assessing the level of physical activity and the Oswestry Disability Index among the employees of the administrative staff in order to develop recommendations for the prevention and prophylaxis of musculoskeletal disorders.MATERIALS AND METHODS: In the period 2021–2023 an interdisciplinary project was carried out with the support of the Science Fund of the Medical University of Varna. A survey was carried out, consisting of a questionnaire for assessing physical activity and the Oswestry Disability Index. The analysis of the results focused on the relationship between the level of physical activity, the localization of chronic pain in the spine area, and the pain intensity. Data were processed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 22.0).RESULTS: The level of physical activity among the studied sample was below the recommended norms by the World Health Organization. The results show that only 39.8% (n = 53) of the respondents exercise two or three times a week. The localization of the pain they experience is in: cervical spine (n = 44 (33.1%)), thoracic spine (n = 12 (9.0%)), and lumbar spine (n = 52 (39.1%)). Some of the respondents did not indicate a specific point of pain (n = 25 (18.8%)). According to the Oswestry Disability Index, n = 113 (85.0%) were in the slightly impaired working capacity category, n = 20 (15.0%) of the surveyed employees had moderately impaired working capacity.CONCLUSION: After analyzing the results, we recommended that office workers periodically changed their position from sitting to standing during work every hour. Another recommendation was to adhere to healthy levels of physical activity outside working hours and to sleep ≥ 6 hours/day, according to the WHO ...