Smoking, particularly among men, may cause or aggravate lower back pain, according to a survey conducted by a doctor at the Gunma University School of Medicine.
Tetsuya Otani polled 6,891 people aged between 40 and 69 who live in the city of Isezaki, Gunma Prefecture, and found the number of people who suffer backache increased correspondingly with the number of cigarettes they smoked.
"While I could not prove an association between cigarette smoking and lower back pain in women because there were not enough female smokers to test, there was a significant correlation in men," Otani said.
The survey, in which respondents were asked 150 questions on their health and lifestyle, covered 3,251 men and 3,640 women.