Association of Text Neck Pain with prolonged Studying and Excessive Smart Phone Usage Among Medical Students

Abstract

Objective: Globally, neck pain is the most frequent pain, rating fourth among the disabilities. Text neck pain is an emergent epidemiological problem, especially among young adults. This study aims to check the frequency of text neck syndrome in both prolonged studying and excessive smartphone usage amongst the young undergraduates of medical college. Study Design and Setting: A cross-sectional study was conducted among at Central Medical College, Lahore. Methodology: The data was collected using a self-designed questionnaire.118 medical students were included in the study. The designed questionnaire gathered information on age, gender, academic year, any health issue, the experience of pain or discomfort, hours for use of any electronic device, and book reading. The reliability was 62% using Cronbach’s alpha. Data were analyzed using SPSS 26. Results: The mean age of the study participants was 22.35 +1.85 years. About 93.2% of the medical students reported discomfort or pain in the neck, shoulder, or back. About 74.6% of the female medical students and 54.5% of male students suffered from headaches with neck pain. The most used device was mobile among 94.1% of students. Experience of pain and discomfort was significantly associated with the number of hours consumed in using the device. Conclusion: The frequency of text neck pain is found to be 93.2%, which is very high among the young population and smartphones are found to be the highest risk factor; use of laptop being the second most common. Female students comparatively suffer more from frequent pain and discomfort.