The role of facet joint arthropathy in chronic low back pain and its association with adjacent paraspinal muscle composition

Abstract

Low back pain (LBP) is a global health burden, but patient phenotyping based on imaging that would facilitate timely and effective treatment regimens lacks behind. One issue is that associations between different structures at the degenerative lumbar spine are not yet well characterized. In this study we revealed that facet joint arthropathy (FJA) at level L4/L5 is associated with the fat fraction (FF) of adjacent paraspinal musculature (PSM) as derived from chemical shift encoding-based water-fat MRI (CSE-MRI), as well as with Modic-type endplate changes, endplate defects, and intervertebral degenerative disk disease (DDD) in patients with chronic LBP.