Abdominal and Back Pain
Causes, Diagnosis and Treatment

The cause of such pain is often not difficult to diagnose, if the nature, timing, severity, character, as well as the pattern and direction of spread is well noted.

Abdominal and back pain occurring together is often a symptom of:

• Disease process or injury to part of the gut that runs deep inside the abdomen

• Injury or disease process in one of the large blood vessels that runs through the abdomen

• In the kidney or one of the tubes that runs from the kidney down to the urinary bladder, called ureter

• Such pain could also arise from problems in the reproductive organs like ovaries, and testicles, causing pain that spread to the back.

There are other rarer causes of abdominal pain spreading to the back, or originating in the back and can be felt in the abdomen.

In specific terms, the common causes of abdominal pain that radiates or spreads to the back include:

1. Biliary colic
2. Cholecystitis
3. Peptic Ulcer disease
4. Pancreatitis
5. Duodenal cancer*
6. Perforated duodenal ulcer
7. Posterior Myocardial Infarction or heart attack affecting the "back of the heart"
8. Leaking or ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA)
9. Dissection of the aorta
10. Pyelonephritis or kidney infection
11. Kidney stone
12. Kidney cancer
13. Ureteric stone
14. Psoas muscle abscess*
15. Tumour of the adrenal gland*
16. Menstrual pain
17. Ovarian cyst (twisted or ruptured or tumour)
18. Labour pain

* The asterisked ones (number 5, 14 and 15 are reasonably rare that they should not be considered as the first possible cause of an abdominal and back pain occurring together. There are also other causes of abdominal and lower back pain in pregnancy and a few related to pain arising from the womb. We shall discuss these in the next section.

We shall now briefly discuss each of the above listed causes of abdominal and back pain, and see how to find out what is possibly causing such pain.

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