Associations between trunk flexion and physical activity of patient care workers for a single shift: A pilot study.
Oscar E Arias, Peter E Umukoro, Sonja D Stoffel and 3 others
PMID 28211832WHAT IT FOUND
Patient care workers spent 74% of a shift upright and had 6 minutes of moderate activity.
More trunk bending correlated with lifestyle or light activity, not moderate or vigorous activity.
Key findings
01During a single shift, workers spent 74% of time upright, 19% in flexed posture, and averaged 124 bends per hour from upright to flexed.
02Physical activity minutes did not differ significantly across low, medium, and high trunk flexion exposure groups.
03Bends from upright to flexed correlated with lifestyle activity minutes (r_s 0.6, p < 0.001), while bends to flexed did not correlate significantly with moderate activity.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Only 47 of 50 recruited workers had usable data, and three had unrecoverable device initialization errors. The study was a pilot with a small sample from six specialized units in two Boston hospitals, so it cannot be assumed to apply to all healthcare workers. Trunk flexion was measured for only a single shift, while physical activity was collected over seven days elsewhere, so day-to-day variation was not assessed. The accelerometer may miss static postures such as bending or lifting, which could underestimate activity, although bending frequency supported low activity levels. The paper did not measure lifting loads, so associations between trunk flexion and actual back load were not directly tested. The design is observational, so it cannot show that trunk flexion causes low back pain or that reducing flexion would improve health. The authors did not test an intervention, so results do not support a treatment or workplace change.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that patient care workers get enough moderate or vigorous physical activity from trunk bending. The workers averaged only 6 minutes of moderate activity and less than 0.5 minutes of vigorous activity per shift, and bending correlated mainly with lifestyle or light activity. This single-shift pilot also cannot show that reducing trunk flexion would prevent low back pain.