Physiotherapists in Pudsey treat many different conditions including the issues profiled below.

Discs and Height

Physical activities change the nature of the intervertebral discs throughout the day and night. The volume and the height of discs can change by up to twenty percent, with a person.s height varying by anything from fifteen to twenty five millimetres. Most of the change in height happens during the first hour after getting up as the body weight loading is applied to the spine. During the night the opposite happens with the disc being unloaded so it sucks in water from the tissue around it until it reaches a balance of pressures on both sides.

This daily cycle of pressure variation changes the water content of the disc regularly and may be part of the explanation as to why back pain sufferers have more pain in the mornings due to the increased tension present in the disc complex. Resting or performing heavy work can cause changes in the hydration of the disc, carrying a twenty kilogram backpack for three hours has been shown to reduce the volume of the discs by 4.5 percent. The amount of water content in the disc does not achieve a specific resting level; it depends on how much loading is going on and for how long.

Lumbar Stenosis

There are many painful syndromes which involve the lumbar spine, with the discs, ligaments, joints, muscles and nerves all implicated in pain production. Older people can present with symptoms which indicate a stenosis of their vertebral canal. The vertebral or spinal canal runs down the back and carries the spinal cord, allowing the nerve roots to exit to the body at each spinal level (each disc level). The spinal canal can be congenitally narrow which increases the chances of developing spinal stenosis with age. As degenerative changes occur in the spinal structures the spinal canal can become narrowed and tight.

The symptoms of spinal stenosis typically do not include back pain but rather leg pain, often bilateral, and worsened by walking but better with sitting. Typically presenting in people of 65 years or older, spinal stenosis can also present as a nerve root irritation of a sciatic type due to stenosis of the exit for the spinal nerve root. Physiotherapy is not usually very useful and little is found on examination apart from a reduction in spinal extension and many people manage their symptoms over time as best they can, although surgical spinal decompression can be very successful in relieving the symptoms.