Pain catastrophizing and trunk co‐contraction during lifting in people with and without chronic low back pain: A cross sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Trunk co-contraction during lifting may reflect a guarded motor response to a threatening task. This work estimated the impact of pain catastrophizing on trunk co-contraction during lifting, in people with and without low back pain. METHODS: Adults with high pain catastrophizing (back pain: n = 29, healthy: n = 7) and low pain catastrophizing (back pain: n = 20, healthy: n = 11), performed 10 repetitions of a lifting task. Electromyography data of rectus abdominis, erector spinae and external oblique muscles were collected, bilaterally. Co-contraction indices were determined for rectus abdominis/erector spinae and external oblique/erector spinae pairings, bilaterally. Pain catastrophizing was measured using the pain catastrophizing scale and task-specific fear using the Photograph series of daily activities scale. Three-way mixed ANOVAs tested the effects of group (back pain vs. healthy), pain catastrophizing (high vs. low), lifting phase (lifting vs. replacing) and their interactions. RESULTS: There were no main effects of pain catastrophizing, lifting phase, nor any interactions (p > 0.05). Group effects revealed greater co-contraction for bilateral erector spinae/rectus abdominis pairings (but not erector spinae-external oblique pairings) in people with back pain, compared to healthy participants, independent of pain catastrophizing and lifting phase (p < 0.05). Spearman correlations associated greater task-specific fear and greater erector spinae-left external oblique co-contraction, only in people with back pain (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Greater co-contraction in the back pain group occurred independent of pain catastrophizing, as measured with a general questionnaire. A task-specific measure of threat may be more sensitive to detecting relationships between threat and co-contraction. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: This work contributes evidence that people with back pain commonly exhibit trunk co-contraction when lifting. The lack of a relationship between pain catastrophizing and trunk co-contraction, however, challenges evidence linking psychological factors and guarded motor behaviour in this group. Together, this suggests that other factors may be stronger determinants of co-contraction in people with LBP or that a general construct like pain catastrophizing may not accurately represent this relationship.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".