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Causes of Back Pain / Bothersome Back: New reports indicate effects of lifestyle choices on spine
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Studies reveal the interconnectedness of the back with the body |
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There's recent talk behind your back: the findings are somewhat unexpected.
Recent studies show curious connections about the spine and the body and somewhat surprising observations about effective back care.
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Smoking, high blood pressure and cholesterol can lead to low back pain and bone degeneration. |
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Lifestyle choices like smoking and eating fatty foods may weigh heavily on one's back, according to a new study.
Johns Hopkins University researchers in Baltimore discovered that heart and blood vessel damage brings on lower back pain and lumbar degenerative disease.
The findings were gathered from data on 1,300 alumni doctors who graduated from Hopkins between 1948 and 1964.
Physicians who smoke and have high blood pressure--hypertension--and high cholesterol risk having fatty plaque clog their blood vessels in their lower back.
Those risk factors damage blood vessels by forming collections of fatty deposits underneath their inner lining, which can cause the blockage or occlusion of these blood vessels, says lead study author Nicholas U. Ahn, MD, chief resident in the department of orthopaedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
This may lead to low back pain, plus bone and disc degeneration years down the road.
Because we had the subjects' medical records and answers from self-reported questionnaires over such a long period of time--a 53-year period of time for the oldest patients--, we were able to determine if the risk factors, such as smoking or high cholesterol, preceded the development of the disease years later, explains Dr. Ahn. In this case, the disease of interest is lumbar spine pain and deterioration.
Dr. Ahn points out that to prove a causative association from a long-term prospective study is very powerful because one can show that the cause occurred before the effect, as opposed to the other way around.
When you look at data retrospectively, you cannot demonstrate that the risk factor occurred before the disease, which makes the association and the supposed causality less convincing.
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Smokingis detrimental to the entire musculoskeletal system, surgeons find. |
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Other researchers concur on harm from cigarettes.
University of Toronto researchers find that smoking is bad for bones, muscles, and joints.
There's definitely an increasing body of evidence that smoking is bad for you from a bone point of view, said study co-author Michael D. McKee, MD. There's very little question now about that.
Bone health was examined in more than 100 patients undergoing complex reconstructive surgery.
We found that the people who are smokers had a much worse outcome in a variety of different parameters including the overall outcome, the quality of the bone formed, and the complication rate compared to nonsmokers, Dr. McKee said.
The orthopedic surgeon says new formation of bone depends on an adequate supply of blood and oxygen reaching that area and notes that smoking is detrimental to blood supply and oxygen delivery.
Says McKee, When someone comes to my office and needs a complex reconstruction of the tibia and they smoke I tell them flat out, €˜You need to stop smoking and when you do, we will do your operation.'
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Frequent use of back belts failed to reduce incidence of pain or injury claims amont 9,000 hardware store workers. |
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US Centers for Disease and Control researchers studied around 9,000 hardware store workers who wore back belts in medicine's largest study of back belt use and effectiveness.
Back injuries are the leading cause of disability among otherwise healthy adults. Pain associated with the back is the most costly medical problem for 30- to 50-year olds.
Pain in the lower back, according to the researchers, accounted for 23 percent, or US$8.8 billion, of all compensation payments to workers in 1995, the researchers noted.
In 1998, numbers gathered by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there were 279,507 back injuries due to overexertion which lead to missed work days. Eighty-nine percent of these accidents occurred in material handling.
Increasing numbers of individuals like construction workers, stock clerks, and delivery workers now wear thick elastic and Velcro braces or weightlifting-style belts to support or prevent an aching back.
Some companies mandate the wearing of a weight belt.
In the study, frequent wearing of the belts failed to reduce reports of pain or injury claims.
In the mid-1990's, yearly sales of such devices reached approximately 4 million.
Data gathered in the study was adjusted for multiple individual risk factors.
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