CORRELATION BETWEEN LOW BACK PAIN AND RECTUS ABDOMINIS MUSCLE WEAKNESS USING KENDALL’S GRADING SCALE

Abstract

BACKGROUND
Kendall’s approach is used to test the muscles strength and to
determine the correct alignment of the muscle fibers. The
major causes of back pain are work related problem,
mechanical stress on muscles and faulty postures, which leads
to core muscle weakness particularly rectus abdominis or may
cause DRA. Thus the study aims to identify a causal relationship
between low back pain and rectus abdominis muscle
weakness using Kendall’s grading scale.
STUDY DESIGN
Cross Sectional Study
SAMPLING TECHNIQUE
Non-probability convenience sampling technique
METHODOLOGY
142 (men 33.80% and women 66.20%) participants with low
back pain were recruited in the study. The Kendall grading
scale test the strength of muscles of the upper and lower
rectus abdominis muscles among the participants while
self-administered questionnaire was used to identify the
nature of the back pain.
RESULT
Sperman’s rho coefficient of correlation was applied to find
out the cause effective correlation between the two
variables, result shows no significant cause effective correlation
between the upper and lower back pain and lower
rectus abdominis muscles weakness (P>0.05) with r= 0.065 and
r=0.031respectively.
CONCLUSION
Although core muscle weaknesses are the source of back
pain but no significant cause effective correlation exist
between the two variables in this study.

KEYWORDS
Rectus Abdominis, low back pain, Kendall’s grading scale,
Numeric Pain Rating Scale, Spearman’s correlation, Abdominal
Strength test.