Background:
Various inputs of proprioception have been identified and shown to influence low back proprioception sense.
Objective:
To investigate the effect of disrupting proprioception on lumbar spine repositioning error during forward bending.
Method:
Healthy-subjects (
) and patients with non-specific chronic low-back pain (
) aged between 20–50 years. Subjects performed 5 repetitions of a lumbar repositioning task targeting 30° of trunk-forward-bending from a seated-position with different proprioceptive disturbances administered to the low back. Video analysis of skin reflective markers measured lumbar spine range-of-motion. A control-task was performed without any proprioceptive disturbance, while the remaining 4 tasks were electro-stimulation, vibration, taping and sitting on an unstable surface.
Results:
The healthy group showed significantly altered repositioning error when compared with the control task (
): control-task vs. taping-task, vibration-task and unstable-sitting. In the NS-CLBP group, one motor-task showed significant difference in control-task vs. taping-task (
). Comparison between the NS-CLBP and matched-healthy groups revealed that the NS-CLBP subjects had larger repositioning-error (
) for control, taping and vibration tasks.
Conclusions:
Proprioceptive disturbances had the most significant effect in increasing repositioning-error among healthy subjects. The between-groups analysis confirmed evidence consistent with the literature of greater repositioning-error in people with NS-CLBP than healthy subjects.
