Effect of Eight Weeks of Resistance Training with Motor Skills and pain reprocessing therapy on Pain and Psychological Factors of flight attendants with non-specific chronic back pain

Non-specific chronic back pain is the third known cause of disability in musculoskeletal disease. The prevalence of this type of back pain is very common among flight attendants and has been reported due to standing for long periods of time, doing repetitive tasks, and carrying things in different ways. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of eight weeks of resistance exercises with and without motor skill exercises and pain reprocessing therapy on pain and psychological factors of flight attendants with non-specific chronic back pain.

The present research is a double-blind randomized clinical trial. 52 female flight attendants with non-specific chronic back pain were randomly divided into three experimental groups and one control group. In order to assess the level of pain, the visual analog scale of pain, DAS questionnaire for depression, anxiety, and fear variables, Tempa questionnaire for fear of movement, pain catastrophizing scale and fear avoidance beliefs questionnaire related to work and physical activity were used. All four groups performed the selected exercises for eight weeks. In order to maintain the permanence of the effect of the exercises, re-evaluation was done after three months of the exercises. T-test was used to examine intra-group changes, one-way analysis of variance and Bonferroni's post-hoc test were used to examine inter-group changes, and repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to examine the interactive effect of time on the group (P≤0.05).

The results of one-way analysis of variance test for inter-group changes showed that the main effect of time is significant except for the anxiety variable in other research variables (P ≤ 0.05).

The results of the present study showed that resistance exercises along with motor skills training and pain reprocessing have a significant effect on reducing pain and improving psychological factors.