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Record W4407275452 · doi:10.1136/bjsports-2024-108488

Impact of exercise on musculoskeletal pain and disability in the postpartum period: a systematic review and meta-analysis

2025· review· en· W4407275452 on OpenAlexafffund
Stéphanie-May Ruchat, Nicole Beamish, Sophie Pellerin, Muhammad Usman Ali, Sinéad Dufour, Sarah Meyer, Allison Sivak, Margie H. Davenport

Bibliographic record

VenueBritish Journal of Sports Medicine · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicPregnancy-related medical research
Canadian institutionsWomen and Children’s Health Research InstituteUniversity of AlbertaUniversité de MontréalQueen's UniversityMcMaster UniversityUniversité du Québec à Trois-Rivières
FundersUniversité du Québec à Trois-Rivières
KeywordsMedicinePhysical therapyVisual analogue scalePsychological interventionRandomized controlled trialPopulationTrunkPhysical medicine and rehabilitationSurgery

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

OBJECTIVE: To examine the impact of exercise on musculoskeletal pain (low back pain (LBP), pelvic girdle pain (PGP), lumbopelvic pain (LBPP) and bodily pain) and kinesiophobia during the postpartum period. DESIGN: Systematic review with random effects meta-analysis. STUDY ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Online databases were searched from database inception to 12 January 2024. Studies of all designs (except case studies) of any publication date or language were included if they contained information on the population (women and people in the first year postpartum), intervention (subjective or objective measures of frequency, intensity, duration, volume or type of exercise, alone ('exercise-only') or in combination with other interventions (eg, electrotherapy, infrared irradiation, ultrasound; 'exercise+cointervention')), comparator (no exercise or different exercise measures) and outcome (symptom severity of LBP/PGP/LBPP, related disability, bodily pain and kinesiophobia). RESULTS: 37 studies (N=3769 participants) from 15 countries were included. Moderate certainty evidence showed that exercise-only interventions, including various strengthening exercises targeting the trunk muscles, were associated with a greater reduction in LBPP symptom severity (4 randomised controlled trials (RCTs), n=210; mean difference -2.21 points (on a 0-10 Visual Analogue Scale) 95% CI -3.33 to -1.08) and related disability (6 RCTs, n=296; standardised mean difference -1.17, 95% CI -1.92 to -0.43; large effect size) as compared with no exercise. Similar results were found for bodily pain (2 RCTs, n=318). Evidence was limited and inconclusive regarding the impact of exercise interventions on kinesiophobia. CONCLUSION: Postnatal exercises, including a variety of muscular strengthening exercises targeting the trunk muscles, decrease the symptom severity of LBPP and related disability.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.017
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.014
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (broad)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.417
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0170.014
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0150.003
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.399
Teacher spread0.359 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations16
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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