Many folks who log on to our web site write us because they’re concerned that the development of chronic neck pain seems to affect their general quality of life. This correlation is intuitively obvious since anyone who has chronic pain would by the nature of that pain have an overall sense that the quality of their life is less than it should be.

This association was recently documented in a very interesting study by Nolet and associates from the Department of Health at the University of Alberta, Canada and Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. The primary authors were chiropractors who routinely work with the patients with neck pain.

This study included 1100 randomly sampled Saskatchewan adults with new onset of neck pain. When participants were interviewed six months after the onset of neck pain and asked to take a test called the health-related quality of life test (HRQoL), it did in fact document that chronic neck pain is a predictor of poor physical quality of life. This study was published in the Spine Journal this year (2015).

More about chronic neck pain and cervical surgery can be found on CervicalHerniatedDisc.com.

 

Jack Stern, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.S.