An 81 Year Old with Back Pain

An 81 Year Old with Back Pain

You see an 81-year-old man in the emergency department. He has been troubled by abdominal and back pain that has been worsening over the last two days. He has smoked 20 cigarettes a day for the last 60 years. On examination his heart rate is 110 beats per minute and his blood pressure is 130/80 mmhg. He is tender over the central abdomen and you feel a pulsatile mass above the umbilicus. You re...

A 54-year-old woman with degenerative back pain.

Back pain is a common symptom: up to 70% of UK adults experience this symptom by the age of 60 and most have moderate to severe pain. Back pain accounted for 12% of consultations to traditional acupuncturists in 2001 and is one of the most common reasons for consultation with an acupuncturist. This case report concerns a 54-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer and degenerative lower bac...

A 39-year-old male with upper back pain.

A 39-year-old immigrant from South-East Asia presented with several months of worsening upper back pain. He described night sweats and weight loss put denied any other complaints. On admission, computed tomography scan showed destruction of the 5th thoracic vertebral body with paraspinous soft tissue mass that narrowed the central canal (Figure 1, upper panel). Decompression surgery was done. S...

A 50-year-old man with chronic low back pain.

Mr S, a 50-year-old man, has long-standing low back pain. His pain began more than 20 years earlier with a lumbar disk herniation and has persisted despite diskectomy. He has undergone numerous treatments, but he remains disabled with ongoing pain. His treatment course is used to frame the epidemiology and pathophysiology underlying acute and chronic lumbosacral and radicular pain. The roles of...

A 46-year-old man with acute low-back pain.