The degeneration process occurs naturally: the intervertebral disc contains over 80% of water, making it spongy to play the good role of a buffer. However, the older people get, the lower the amount of water reduces, making the disc highly likely fail to fulfill its task. Consequently, proteins in the disc degrade and run out of fibrous tissue.

Causes: Some cases of disc syndrome cause pain while others do not and no reason has been identified so far. There are many factors that inflict injury on the disc, such as:

• If the disc is damaged or degenerated, it will lose its stability, which can be inflamed, causing pain in the lumbar region.
• In some patients’ skeletal structure, the nerve endings pierce the outer fibrous ring of the disc more deeply than the one in others, making the degenerative discs become one of the agents causing pain.

Diagnosis: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) makes a great contribution to our understanding of lumbar vertebral degeneration and natural degeneration progress. With the development of this technique, the disc structure is vividly illustrated, helping the doctor diagnose backache accurately. Additionally, MRI also shows that:

• A large number of young patients suffering from chronic low back pain showing signs of disc syndrome.
• About 30% of adults do not have backache but find themselves with the degenerative disc.
• However, MRI is not the only tool in the diagnosis of the disc syndrome. Therefore, the doctor needs to combine MRI with the muscle test result and the past medical history of each patient.

Diagnosis:

In most cases, the disc syndrome will be cured by using chiropractic (none-surgery) or medication to reduce inflammation (drinking or injection) and doing exercises. Surgery is just the last resort if the disease does not show the sign of remission after 6 months of treatments or if the disease is extremely serious.

Patients can have pain alleviated in many different methods without resorting to surgery.

Being lightly active.

The first step of the treatment is not to make the illness worse. The best way is not to lift a heavy load and play sports that require spinning or twisting such as playing golf, basketball or football. Another way is that patients should learn how to do properly when lifting heavy objects, choosing the right type of chair and sleeping in the right posture to reduce the force on the back.