Abstract
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was the cause of lockdowns, which had restricted the movement of the nation. Academic regulations meant that students were forced to work remotely from home. This came with a rise in sedentary behaviours in students. Students were thus less physically active, and more prone to have musculoskeletal (MSK) pain, subsequently due to poor ergonomics and lifestyle choices.
Aim: The primary aim of this study was to determine the onset and prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) amongst undergraduate Health Science students at the University of Johannesburg,
with regards to COVID-19 academic regulations. The secondary aim was to determine the types of MSDs the students experienced due to the lifestyle changes they had made since the work-from-home transition.
Method: This was an explorative, quantitative, cross-sectional study design. Each question within the survey corresponded to how the student felt during lockdown. The survey highlighted the implications of the work-from-home lifestyle and its impacts on MSK health in Health Science students, namely in the departments of Sport Management, Complementary Medicine, Podiatry and Biokinetics.
Procedure: Participants were recruited via the channels of communication available at each department i.e., WhatsApp student groups or email via the class representatives. Students who were willing to participate followed a link to the Google Form where they then completed the questionnaire.
Results and Discussion: One hundred and one (101) students completed the questionnaire (14.7% response rate), of which 74 of the participants were female, 23 were male and 4 were non-binary. The student’s habitual changes since lockdown revealed that students had exercised from time to time and had spent a median time of seven hours on their cell phones, three hours watching television (TV)/playing video games and four hours on their computers. Overall, more students were extremely to moderately impacted by symptoms during lockdown, whereas before lockdown they were very much or only slightly impacted. Almost half of the students rated their workstation ergonomics as fair, and more than a quarter of the students rated their workstation ergonomics as poor. Extreme stress was reported by more than half of the students during lockdown. The most common region of pain was in the student’s backs and necks, and this pain was not due to any physical trauma in 70 of the 101 students.
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Conclusion: In conclusion, the study results have shown that the students had spent more time being sedentary and less time being physically active. Thus, bad postural habits were adopted by students in their ergonomically poor environments, which resulted in MSDs.
Keywords: COVID-19, sedentary behaviours, musculoskeletal pain, physical activity, and ergonomics.