An Epidemiologic Study of MRI and Low Back Pain in 13-Year-Old Children

Abstract

In children, degenerative disc findings are relatively common, and some are associated with LBP. There appears to be a gender difference. Disc protrusions, endplate changes, and anterolisthesis in the lumbar spine were strongly associated with seeking care for LBP.

Temporal Association of Annular Tears and Nuclear Degeneration: Lessons from the Pediatric Population

“…9 They also found 10 disks from subjects who died after the first 2 decades in which the radial tears were seen in the absence of nuclear clefts. We found a higher prevalence of annular tears than nuclear degeneration in our study, which contrasts with the observations of Kjaer et al 12 The prevalence of signal-intensity loss reported by them was higher relative to that of annular tears. They reported almost 21.2% disks with abnormal signal intensity (defined as intermediate or hypointense signal intensity) but only 7.3% disks with annular tears (including 5.0% of disks with "high-intensity zones").…”

“…5 These results are, however, discordant with the observations of some prior investigators. 9,12 Haefeli et al 9 found that radial tears were relatively rare in first 2 decades of life, and nuclear clefts preceded radial and concentric tears. 9 There are a number of factors that may explain these differences.…”

“…Studies that do focus on the disk degeneration in children either have not included annular tears in their analysis 10,11 or have mainly looked at the clinical implications of annular tears. 12 The purpose of our study was to look for the association of annular tears and nuclear degeneration in the pediatric population. We hypothesized that annular tears are associated with nuclear degeneration in this group.…”

Vertebral endplate signal changes (Modic change): a systematic literature review of prevalence and association with non-specific low back pain

“…Of the 58 study samples that reported the prevalence of VESC in individuals, 45 were from clinical populations, two from the general population [81,82], four from the working population (including top athletes) [13,17,36,88], and the seven study samples of the non-LBP populations were from six studies [24,31,38,62,78,153]. The median prevalence of VESC was 6% in study samples of individuals without LBP (n = 7), 12% in the general population (n = 2), 6% in the working population (n = 4), and 43% in study samples from the clinical population (n = 45).…”

“…The prevalence of VESC varies greatly between the studies ranging from less than 1% [82] in adolescents from the Danish general population to 100% [41,149] in selected patient populations. A large number of studies and narrative reviews have reported on VESC in patient populations with specific LBP (e.g.…”