Lumbar spinal stenosis is actually a common disease that affects the quality of life of middle-aged and elderly people. Many elderly people work hard all their lives, but after retirement, they find that they have lumbar spinal stenosis, often have back and leg pain, can’t walk long distances, and even buy a grocery or cook a meal are greatly affected, and their happy life after retirement often becomes a bubble. Caring for the elderly in your family and reading the series of articles on lumbar spinal stenosis will enable you to better demonstrate filial piety in front of your parents. Focusing on the doctor’s articles may not give you the pleasure of gossip, but it can really help your loved ones. Because of the heart, it is professional. What are the signs of having lumbar spinal stenosis? Most people with lumbar spinal stenosis have chronic low back pain with pain in the buttocks and the back of the thighs, even radiating to the calves and feet. Initially, the pain is not very severe, with muscle fatigue, and can improve with a little rest or a change of position. With the development of the disease, the location of the pain can gradually move down to the lateral side of the calf, often accompanied by abnormal sensation or local numbness, and some patients even have numbness, swelling and heat and pins and needles in the perineum, and a few patients have sexual function and urinary and bowel disorders. The typical manifestation of lumbar spinal stenosis patients is intermittent claudication. The so-called intermittent claudication is that after walking for a period of time (usually hundreds of meters, or tens of meters in severe cases), the patient develops lumbago, lumbago, numbness and weakness of the lower extremities on one or both sides, and even claudication, but after squatting or sitting down and resting for a few minutes, the above symptoms can be relieved or disappear, and then the patient can continue walking again, and after walking for a period of time, the above symptoms appear again, and as a last resort, it is necessary to squat or sit down again to rest for a After walking for a while, the above symptoms appear again, and as a last resort, the patient needs to squat or sit down again to rest for a few moments. Because the limp occurs intermittently during this process, it is called intermittent claudication. The performance of intermittent claudication can gradually worsen, that is, the distance that can be insisted on walking becomes shorter and shorter, and the time needed to rest becomes longer and longer. Expert interpretation: lumbar spinal stenosis belongs to one of the degenerative diseases of the lumbar intervertebral disc, while there is often osteophytes of the small joints, which may also be accompanied by instability of the lumbar spine in the degenerative process. Degeneration of the intervertebral disc, osteophytes of the small joints and instability of the lumbar spine can all cause pain in the lumbar region. Once the lumbar spinal stenosis becomes severe to a certain extent, it can cause nerve root compression, resulting in radioactive pain in the lower extremities, which can then reach the lower legs and feet, accompanied by numbness and coldness in the limbs. Intermittent claudication is related to the compression of the cauda equina nerve. The ischemia of the cauda equina nerve is aggravated after walking for a certain distance and can be relieved after resting, and this performance is somewhat similar to angina pectoris, in which the coronary arteries can meet the blood supply of the heart in daily life, but once overexertion or anger increases the load on the heart, symptoms appear. What the two have in common is that both are the result of the body’s plumbing system narrowing and aging with age to the point of being overwhelmed. How can I tell if I really have lumbar spinal stenosis? Lumbar spinal stenosis is characterized by a high number of complaints by the patient, but often nothing is found by the physician during physical examination, which means that there are many complaints and few signs. Generally speaking, patients with lumbar spinal stenosis are older and often have pressure pain at the lesion site, and the paravertebral muscles may have spasm, especially the waist cannot be extended backward, which is an important sign of the disease. If lumbar spinal stenosis is suspected, a frontal and lateral lumbar spine radiograph can be taken, which can clearly show the morphology of the lumbar spine, the size of the spinal canal, and the osteophytes, especially in the lateral phase, which can be seen in the protrusion of obvious hyperplastic spurs into the spinal canal. To further clarify the diagnosis, CT scan and MRI of the lumbar spine can more clearly show the degree and location of spinal stenosis. Expert interpretation: The diagnosis of any disease cannot be made without careful history taking and physical examination. History taking is to understand what pain the disease has caused to the patient, and physical examination is to determine whether the doctor has a certain disease through some physical methods such as basic looking, touching, moving, measuring, and some specialized techniques. On this basis, the doctor will have a preliminary clinical impression, and then further confirm the diagnosis through some auxiliary examinations such as blood biochemical tests and imaging examinations to make a clinical diagnosis. This is the same process for patients suspected of having lumbar spinal stenosis. The doctor will first take a medical history and physical examination, and when the disease is suspected, a frontal and lateral X-ray of the lumbar spine may be taken to understand whether there is significant lumbar degeneration, and on this basis, a CT scan or MRI of the lumbar spine will be applied to further confirm the diagnosis of lumbar spinal stenosis.