Many factors are associated with the development of low back pain. Among them, exercise, obesity, smoking, age, educational level and stress are the most common. This study examined the association of these factors with low back pain. An additional aim was to determine a procedure for preventing low back pain. This study analyzed the responses to a questionnaire sent to 772 individuals who had undergone a medical examination at this hospital in 2003 and excluded the individuals who had shown symptoms or their test results indicated a particular disease. Assuming that there were no variables, individuals who exercised regularly 3-4 times per week would have a lower chance of having low back pain than those who did not exercise regularly. The analysis revealed that individuals with a college degree or higher education have a lower chance of experiencing low back pain than those with only a high school education or even college drop-outs. When the other variables were constant, age, extent of obesity (body mass index), smoking and level of stress were not found to affect the development of low back pain. The level of education was associated with the development of low back pain. However, regular exercise 3-4 times per week or more would be most effective in reducing the incidence and duration of low back pain.

Recent papers suggest protective ventilation (PV) as a primary ventilation strategy during one-lung ventilation (OLV) to reduce postoperative pulmonary morbidity. However, data regarding the advantage of the PV strategy in patients with normal preoperative pulmonary function are inconsistent, especially in the case of minimally invasive thoracic surgery. Therefore we compared conventional OLV (V T 10 ml/kg, FiO 2 1.0, zero PEEP) to protective OLV (V T 6 ml/kg, FiO 2 0.5, PEEP 5 cmH 2 O) in patients with normal preoperative pulmonary function tests undergoing video-assisted thoracic surgery. Oxygenation, respiratory mechanics, plasma interleukin-6 and malondialdehyde levels were measured at baseline, 15 and 60 minutes after OLV and 15 minutes after restoration of two-lung ventilation. P a O 2 and P a O 2 /FiO 2 were higher in conventional OLV than in protective OLV (P <0.001). Interleukin-6 and malondialdehyde increased over time in both groups (P <0.05); however, the magnitudes of increase were not different between the groups. Postoperatively there were no differences in the number of patients with P a O 2 /FiO 2 <300 mmHg or abnormalities on chest radiography. Protective ventilation did not provide advantages over conventional ventilation for video-assisted thoracic surgery in this group of patients with normal lung function.

No abstract