Introduction
Back pain during pregnancy is very common. The main cause is mainly the weight, which pulls down the mother’s belly due to the weight of the growing child. In order to ensure an upright gait, the mother’s back muscles must counteract accordingly. As the back muscles are often not prepared and trained for this increasing weight, it can happen that the spine cannot be held upright and goes into a bad posture.
Causes
Back pain during pregnancy occurs in 50 to 75% of women. Here it is important to distinguish between different triggers of back pain in order to be able to treat it appropriately. On the one hand there is real back pain, which is actually caused by the pregnancy.
A pregnant woman carries a lot more weight around with her during this time, which is an additional burden for the body. This weight is mainly concentrated on the front part of the body, i.e. mainly on the belly, later also on the breast. As a result, these women tend to put their backs in a hollow back, which is an incorrect posture of the back, which then leads to tension and finally to back pain.
To make matters worse, the pregnancy hormones released have a negative effect on the back. They actually have the task of preparing the female body for the birth, which is why they ensure that the birth canal and the pelvis can widen considerably during the birth. However, ligaments and tissues loosen not only in this area but also in the spinal column, and thus the strength of the joints decreases.
Ligaments become loose and tend to overstretch: The support provided by the spinal column therefore diminishes. The space that the child now occupies in the abdomen can also constrict nerves. For this reason, pregnant women in particular (but not only) often suffer from so-called sciatica pain, which can manifest itself as numbness and/or weakness.
The pain often radiates into the legs. In extreme cases, the incorrect posture in the spine caused by the growing abdomen can lead to increasing degenerative changes in the spine. Although the pregnancy is rather too short to cause long lasting, degenerative changes, however, in addition to bone wear and tear, herniated discs can also occur, which then lead to corresponding pain in the back.
In this case, the expectant mother should increasingly take it easy on herself in order to relieve the spinal column of the corresponding load. A herniated disc during pregnancy is almost always located in the lumbar spine. Pregnant women develop a hollow back with increasing pregnancy, which favors the occurrence of a herniated disc and thereby back pain.
Far more frequently back pain in pregnancy is caused by so-called myogeloses. These are muscle tensions that can be so strong and intense that they press on a nerve and can thus lead to pain in the back area. In most cases, these muscle tensions are caused by the malposition of the spine. The muscles that run laterally along the spine try to keep the spine in an upright position. If the muscles are not trained accordingly, the tensions and the perceived back pain occur.