Dorsopathies: routine checkups as a procedure necessary for early diagnostics, risk factors and comorbidities identification

Abstract

Early detection of dorsopathies is an urgent task for primary care physicians, since such conditions can combine with other chronic noncommunicable diseases (NСD) and adversely affect the course all comorbidities, consequently disimproving the quality of life of patients and increasing the frequency of their requests for medical assistance. This study aimed to determine the value of routine checkups in the context of detection of dorsopathies, NCD, and identification of risk factors (RF). We have retrospectively analyzed the patient records database of a rural outpatient clinic in the Tver region (years 2015 to 2017). The prevalence of dorsopathies and NCD RF were the subjects investigated. Fisher's exact test and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) were applied for the purposes of statistical processing of the results. We discovered that dorsopathy most often was a comorbidity to arterial hypertension and gastrointestinal tract diseases; it was strongly related to the NCD (SRCC = 0.506), age (SRCC = 0.383), slightly less so — to hypodynamia (SRCC = 0.146), type of the patient's occupation (intellectual or physical labor) (SRCC = 0.07). Routine checkups improve the rate of detection of dorsopathy: the more patients undergo such examinations, the more cases of dorsopathy are diagnosed. Thus, it is necessary to increase the number of working people attending the checkups in order to detect dorsopathies early and prevent them effectively.