New research from Boston Medical Center identifies elevated mortality risk for women with back pain when compared to women without back pain.

The research cites chiropractic care among the treatments that are effective and safe for managing back pain.

Other treatments are known to have potentially serious side effects, such as opioids for pain management. Countless Americans have died as a result of the opioid epidemic, and low back pain is among the most common reasons why opioids are prescribed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report recently highlighting the continued impact of the epidemic, with 87,000 Americans dying of overdose in the past year (ending September 2020), the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded.

This is the first systematic literature review on the association of back pain and mortality, and was followed by a meta-analysis of all-cause mortality in 11 studies with 81,337 middle-aged and older adults. Age did not appear to have an effect on the association between back pain and mortality in this review, an unexpected result considering past research showing the impact of back pain on disability increases with age. The highest risk of mortality associated with back pain was observed in studies that only included women, and those that identified adults with more severe back pain.

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