2024, a year to improve your patients’ lifestyle as well as your own?

Dear colleagues,

The editorial board of the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation (JBMR) wishes all of you a fantastic 2024 with great health, peace and prosperity! May your good intentions for the year ahead endure and bring about positive changes. Let’s build new traditions that contribute to the sustainability of health in our lives and the lives of our patients.

All over the world, the emphasis on adopting healthy lifestyles is growing, with new medical specialists being trained specifically into the area of lifestyle medicine. While we live longer, statistics reveal a concerning trend: our years spent in good health, free from chronic disorders are reducing significantly. Addressing this requires a focus on behavioural change models and prevention strategies.

It appears that knowing is not enough to change your lifestyle, and that is exactly why so many of these good intentions tend to fail. That is why treatment adherence tends to fail, simply because there is insufficient attention for these changes in behaviour. This involves thorough knowledge of implementing best strategies for optimal prevention and behavioural change models. Training students from the very beginning on prevention strategies and lifestyle medicine, changing the focus of treating illnesses towards health is one of the key points. Still, most of behavioural change models are best received by highly educated and high socioeconomic standards. Health disparities tend to increase even further.

For 2024, one of the large challenges appear to make health inclusive, creating equal chances for everyone, whether in chronic disorders, low socioeconomic status or not. New studies focussing on these disparities are highly needed.

In this issue, we see an example of how lifestyle-related factors, in this case quality of sleep, are related to cognitive factors, pain and sensitization in patients with back pain. The authors suggest that sleep quality is indirectly mediated through cognitive factors and sensitization, leading to reduction in quality of life [1]. Furthermore, breathing training was found to significantly reduce pain and improve pulmonary function in patients with back pain, straining the importance of sufficient relaxation in this group [2]. Next, our Editor’s Choice award, which is rewarded in every new issue, deals with changing sedentary lifestyle in the elderly by comparison of two aerobic training programs. We congratulate Zhang and colleagues [3] for their valuable contribution to this issue.

For the upcoming year, we wish all readers and researchers the best of luck, not only for providing the best care to your patients, but also to care best for yourself.

On behalf of the entire editorial board, we hope you enjoy reading this issue.

Remko Soer, PhD

Editor-in-Chief