The effects of exercise on back pain during pregnancy: A review article

Back pain is one of the most common musculoskeletal disorders that majority of women experience first episode of back pain during pregnancy. Back pain during pregnancy can reduce quality of life and cause disability in pregnant women. Exercise is one of options for back pain prevention and treatment during pregnancy that seems it does not have side effects and limitations of other treatment options. The aim of this review article was the evaluation of the effects of exercise on back pain during pregnancy.

the databases as ISI، Pubmed، Proquest، Ovid، Scopus، Cochran، Science direct، and sets of Springer، Sage، and search motor of Google with different combination of keywords related to the topic of the study were searched. Iran medex، magiran SID، and Irandoc were also used to find the related articles performed in Iran. Some keywords was used for searching including «pregnancy back pain»، «back pain»، «pregnancy»، and «exercise». This search was carried out in the period of 2001-2014. In addition، a manual search of the literature and the resources used in the literature was performed.

The results of literature searching showed that the performed studies about this field are very scattered and due to different designs of these studies، we cannot provide a definitively sum about the effect of certain exercise program on improvement of back pain during pregnancy. However، generally، the majority of studies show positive effect of exercise on reducing back pain during pregnancy.

Exercise has positive effect on treatment of back pain during pregnancy. Therefore، we suggest that healthy pregnant women who don’t have contraindication for physical exercise to use a standard exercise program during pregnancy for prevention and treatment of pregnancy related back pain.