Back Pain Symptoms

You maybe surprised to know that many aches and pains in your body can be traced to a sore back. Sure, everyone knows that back pain involves pain in your spine, but did you know you can also have pain in your arms and legs?

Everyone experiences pain differently. This is mostly dependent on individual nerve differences people have in their spinal cords.

There are three symptoms of back pain that almost always manifest when you have problems in your back (regardless of your specific back pain type). These are:

• Aching and stiffness that makes your back feel unusually “tight” and inflexible. This can occur anywhere from the neck to the coccyx (hips). You may feel as if your back needs to crack.
• After you exercise, lift weights or run, you experience sharp discomfort in your back. This compounds the tightness you may already feel.
• After a long period of being sedentary or remaining in the same position, you begin to feel a dull pain in your middle or lower back.

When you experience one or more of these symptoms, you have back pain. There are some other less-known symptoms that can accompany your back pain. You may not think that these symptoms are connected to your sore back. These symptoms are:

• Pain in legs that gets worse with sedentary lifestyle (common symptom of sciatica)
• Burning, weakness, tingling or numbness in your leg
• Shooting, radiating pains in your legs or arms when you try to stand up or lift weight
• Pain in legs that feels better when bending over (spinal stenosis)

Even more serious are symptoms that signal fractures within the vertebrae of the spine. Usually, when you hear the word “fracture”, you think of a painful crack in your bone. In the spine, it works a bit differently. The fractures that occur in your spine are compression fractures, which can result from improper exercise, too much lifting, or falls. Usually these fractures occur so gradually that you don’t feel a sudden jolt of pain or hear a “crack”. They are tiny breaks in the bone that worsen over time (months to years).

Here some symptoms that may signal spinal fractures, which should always be investigated by a professional medical doctor:

• Gradual height loss caused by bone loss in the vertebrae
• Increasing curvature of your back- called kyphosis, is the result of vertebrae bowing forward as they lose bone and fracture
• Gastrointestinal pain- caused by abnomal nerve reaction in your stomach. Includes loss of appetite, weight loss, inability to tense abdominal muscles and unusual stomach bulging
• Shortness of breath, painful inhalation- cased by curving of the spine, which compresses the chest cavity
• Pain in upper hip bones- caused by tension as ribs get closer to the pelvis when spine bows forward