Lower back pain is one of the most common causes of a reduced quality of life. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the best suited imaging technique to detect causes of that pain. We retrospectively evaluated the MRIs of the lumbar spine for 200 patients in order to describe the distribution of signs of degeneration with regard to age, sex, and position of the disc affected. The number of spinal segments affected by degeneration increased with age, as did the number of signs of degeneration per segment. In patients aged between 21 and 30, 38.8% of discs were affected, while for patients aged between 51 and 60, 91.6% of discs were affected. There was no statistically significant gender difference. The lower two segments were most commonly affected by degeneration. The most common were structural changes to the discs, which affected 88.4% of patients over 50. Spondylosis was the most common bone-related change, found in 60.4% of patients over the age of 50. A reduction in disc height increases the likelihood of structural changes to the disc and bone-related changes. When investigating risk factors for developing disc-related diseases, the complex disc degeneration patterns described here should be taken into account.
Keywords: age-related changes in lumbar spine; low back pain; lumbar disc degeneration; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); osteochondrosis; spondylosis.