Prevalence of kinesophobia and relation with pain characteristics in chronic non-specific low back pain

According to a few studies, they have commented that the fear of movement (kinesophobia) is one of the determinants of acute pain developing into chronic pain. Another study has concluded that subjects who did not recover in two months developed chronic pain and fear of pain was the most predicting factor of chronic pain. Also, another study mentioned that pain-free subjects when assessed for fear had high chances of developing musculoskeletal pain in the future (vlaeyen) literature also states that among various other psychological factors, kinesophobia is positively associated with pain intensity, disability, in chronic low back pain. But the limitations of these studies were that the sample size was less, the population was heterogeneous and they were not able to find the cause and effect relationship between the pain and other factors as the study was a cross-sectional also studies have stated that objective outcome measures should be used as all of these studies included the self-reported measures and most of these studies were conducted abroad, so the results couldn’t be generalized to all the populations.

 There exists a strong need to find out the prevalence of strong predictors of chronic pain that as kinesophobia and also to find out the correlation between kinesophobia and characteristics of chronic pain using objective methods like pressure algometer (pain pressure threshold) and laterality test in chronic nonspecific low back pain as it is more prevalent in India (60%). Hence this study aims to find out the prevalence of kinesophobia and relation with pain characteristics in chronic non-specific low back pain.