Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 337

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 22 of the 22 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Frequent computer-related activities increase the risk of neck–shoulder and low back pain in adolescents

Open access
Hakala, Paula T., Rimpelä, Arja H., Saarni, Lea A., Salminen, Jouko J.·2006·European Journal of Public Health

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Neck-shoulder pain (NSP) and low back pain (LBP) increased among adolescents in the 1990s and the beginning of 2000. A potential risk factor for this increase is the use of information and communication technology. We studied how the use of computers, the Internet, and mobile phones, playing digital games and viewing television are related to NSP and LBP in adolescents. METHODS: Mailed survey with nationally representative samples of 14-, 16-, and 18-year-old Finns in 2003 (n = 6003, response rate 68%). The outcome variables were weekly NSP and LBP. RESULTS: NSP was perceived by 26% and LBP by 12%. When compared with non-users, the risk of NSP was 1.3 (adjusted odds ratios) when using computers > 2-3 h/day, and 1.8 when using 4-5 h/day; 2.5 when using computers > or = 42 h/week, and 1.7 when using the Internet > or = 42 h/week. Compared with non-users, the risk of LBP was 2.0 when using computers > 5 h/day, 1.7 when using > or = 42 h/week, 1.8 when using the Internet > or = 42 h/week, and 2.0 when playing digital games > 5 h/day. Times spent on digital gaming, viewing television, and using mobile phones were not associated with NSP, nor were use of mobile phones and viewing television with LBP after adjusting for confounding factors. CONCLUSIONS: Frequent computer-related activities are an independent risk factor for NSP and LBP. Daily use of computers exceeding 2-3 h seems to be a threshold for NSP and exceeding 5 h for LBP. Computer-related activities may explain the increase of NSP and LBP in the 1990s and the beginning of 2000.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/eurpub/ckl025

Cites

22 of 22 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 22 references

Cited by

See all 337

Metadata

Authors
Hakala, P. T., Rimpelä, A. H., Saarni, L. A., & Salminen, J. J.
Venue
European Journal of Public Health
Published
2006-03-08
Volume
16
Issue
5
Pages
536-541
ISSN
  • 1101-1262 (ISSN-L)
  • 1464-360X
OpenAlex
W2131094879
Cited by
337
References
22
FWCI
9.27
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Frequent computer-related activities increase the risk of neck–shoulder and low back pain in adolescents. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/eurpub/ckl025
The paper
Hakala, P. T., Rimpelä, A. H., Saarni, L. A., & Salminen, J. J. (2006). Frequent computer-related activities increase the risk of neck–shoulder and low back pain in adolescents. European Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckl025

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.