Poor sleep is a health issue for older adults, and researchers have suggested that low back pain, or LBP, might be one reason for it. This study aimed to combine and review the existing scientific evidence on the connection between LBP and sleep quality in adults who are 60 years of age or older.
To do this, the researchers conducted a systematic review. This is a type of study that collects and analyzes all available research on a specific topic. The plan for this review was publicly registered to ensure transparency. The researchers searched through large digital libraries of scientific articles, including MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO, looking for relevant studies published up to December 2025.
The team looked for specific types of observational studies: cross-sectional studies, which look at a group of people at a single point in time; cohort studies, which follow a group of people over a period of time; and case-control studies, which compare people with a condition to those without. To include studies not written in English, the researchers used a combination of translation by team members and the AI tool ChatGPT.
The initial search found 2,394 articles. After removing duplicates, the titles and summaries of 2,237 articles were screened to see if they were relevant. This led to 191 studies that were read in their entirety. From those, 13 studies were found to be directly related to the research question and were then evaluated for their quality. This quality check is known as assessing the "risk of bias," which judges how likely a study's results are to be skewed or inaccurate due to its design.
The final analysis included five studies that were determined to have a low to moderate risk of bias. Three of these were cross-sectional studies and two were cohort studies. Even though the five studies used different methods to measure low back pain and sleep quality, all of them showed a similar result.
The results indicated that there is a positive small association between low back pain and poor sleep quality. A "positive association" means that as one thing increases, the other tends to increase as well. In this case, it means that having low back pain is linked to having worse sleep. The connection is described as "small," which means the relationship is present but may not be very strong. The review concludes that long-lasting, or chronic, low back pain is associated with poor sleep quality in aging adults.
The study also points out that there are weaknesses in the methods used in the existing research on this topic. Because of these limitations, the authors call for more carefully designed and reliable studies, known as rigorous epidemiological studies, to better understand the connection between low back pain and sleep in older adults.