Previous Shoulder and Low Back Injury, Kinesiophobia, and Fear-Avoidance in Young Adult Asymptomatic Participant Groups

Ergonomics, biomechanics, and clinical human movement studies often describe the use of an asymptomatic young adult cohort as a control group or uninjured population for the study of shoulder and low back musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). While it is acknowledged that psychosocial factors play a role in work-related shoulder and low back musculoskeletal disorder, participant characterization and descriptives emphasize current physical characteristics (anthropometrics, demographics, injury status), without accounting for potentially latent characteristics like previous injury. It is well established that previous injury experience impacts an individual’s emotional and behavioural responses [1], however, previous experiences with work-related injury are often overlooked when recruiting asymptomatic controls. This study reports previous shoulder and low back injury, fear of movement, and fear-avoidance beliefs in 134 asymptomatic university-aged young adults and demonstrates that previous injury experiences impact current beliefs, and opens discussion to including additional participant characteristics in addition to traditional descriptive measures.