Modern life vs. your back: Win the fight

If you're among the 31 million Americans with an aching back, here's an important message from your spine: Stop hunching! Get that bowling ball out of your purse, backpack or other tote; put out that cigarette; and change positions frequently.

New research confirms that modern life habits are a major trigger for the most common kind of back pain -- not the type caused by arthritis or a major disease, but back pain that's linked to stuff you do every day that pushes, pulls, bends and torques your spine.

Do you have text neck?

A brand-new report from the New York Spine Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine center has identified "text neck" -- bending your head down to check your messages -- as a major source of chronic back pain. That's because your head weighs about 10-12 pounds, a weight your spine and the muscles that support it can manage easily when you stand up straight. Tilt about 15 degrees (the amount you might bend your neck to see if you have a text) and the load on your upper spine more than doubles, to 27 pounds. As you tilt further downward, the weight increases. It hits 40 pounds at a 30-degree tilt (about how far you'd bend your neck to read the tiny print on your screen) and a whopping 60 pounds at 60 degrees (bending your neck down far enough to feel the pull in your shoulders). That's gotta hurt, and it does.

That bend distorts the natural curve of your back, leading to inflammation and "wear, tear, degeneration and possibly surgeries." That's important news for America's 58 million-plus smartphone users, who spend up to four hours a day hunched over their tiny screens. That adds up to over 1,000 hours of extra spinal stress per year.

Protect your back: Hold your phone up higher when reading and sending messages. And avoid other hazards that throw your spine off-kilter, like heavy purses and backpacks, and sitting on a thick wallet in your back pocket. All of these knock your spine to one side. Lighten the purse or backpack, and keep your wallet to a quarter inch thick or less (keep bills in your front pocket and carry fewer credit cards).

Smokin' spine pain

A tobacco habit triples your risk for back pain, says a new study from Northwestern University. We already knew that cigarettes boosted odds for backaches, but this report reveals just how much damage they can do -- and how. Brain scans of 160 people with back pain show that smoking strengthens the connection between two parts of the brain that convert temporary pain into chronic pain. Pain relievers dull the ache but don't put a dent in this superhighway to agony.

What works: Kicking the butts. For smokers who quit during the study, this connection became less active and more like that of nonsmokers. That's good news, because it means their risk for chronic pain dropped, too.

Protect your back: Quit smoking. It's never too late to try. Don't be discouraged by relapses; just try again. Find out about the best way to become an ex-smoker at sharecare.com.

Sitting, standing, stress

If you're on your feet all day, you probably already know that prolonged standing can do a number on your spine, but so can prolonged sitting at a desk. Doing either one the wrong way puts extra pressure on your spine's stack of discs and surrounding muscles.

Protect your back: Supportive footwear can help if you stand for much of the day. Taking brief breaks to sit or move around works, too. If your job keeps you at your desk, get up every 20-30 minutes, walk around and stretch for 90 seconds. Make sure your desk chair supports your lower back and that you can keep your feet flat on the floor, with your knees at hip level or a little lower. Use a headset instead of tucking your phone between your ear and shoulder, too.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, is host of "The Dr. Oz Show" and Dr. Mike Roizen is chief medical officer at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc.

Read more here information on back pain visit www.spechtpt.com

Keep Your Head Up: 'Text Neck' Takes A Toll On The Spine

"Text neck," the posture formed by leaning over a cellphone while reading and texting, is a big problem, according to the author of a newly published study in the National Library of Medicine.

Kenneth K. Hansraj, chief of spine surgery at New York Spine Surgery & Rehabilitation Medicine, says the bad posture can put up to 60 pounds of pressure on the upper spine — sometimes for several hours a day, depending on how often people look at their devices.

"It is an epidemic or, at least, it's a very common," Hansraj told The Washington Post. "Just look around you — everyone has their heads down."

An adult's head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. According to Hansraj's research, which will be published next month in Surgical Technology International, tilting the head forward just 15 degrees can increase the force on the cervical spine to 27 pounds. And at 60 degrees — the common texting posture seen on sidewalks, metros and office hallways everywhere — the stress on the spine can hit 60 pounds, thanks to the forces of gravity.

"People spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads tilted over reading and texting on their smartphones and devices. Cumulatively this is 700 to 1,400 hours a year of excess stresses seen about the cervical spine," Hansraj's study reads.

And a high school student, according to the research, could spend 5,000 more hours hunched over this way.

"These stresses may lead to early wear, tear, degeneration, and possible surgeries," Hansraj writes.

While it is nearly impossible to avoid technology, Hansraj says in the study that people should make an effort to look at their phones with a "neutral spine," sending their eyes downward, not their heads.

Proper upper spine posture, he says, is generally defined as aligning the ears with the shoulders while keeping the shoulder blades pulled back.

By: Laura Sullivan

For more information on neck pain, please visit www.spechtpt.com.

You already know your chronological age, but do you know your fitness age?

A new study of fitness and lifespan suggests that a person’s so-called fitness age – determined primarily by a measure of cardiovascular endurance – is a better predictor of longevity than chronological age. The good news is that unlike your actual age, your fitness age can decrease.

The concept of fitness age has been developed by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who have studied fitness and how it relates to wellness for years.

Fitness age is determined primarily by your VO2max, which is a measure of your body’s ability to take in and utilize oxygen. VO2max indicates your current cardiovascular endurance.

It also can be used to compare your fitness with that of other people of the same age, providing you, in the process, with a personal fitness age. If your VO2max is below average for your age group, then your fitness age is older than your actual age. But if you compare well, you can actually turn back the clock to a younger fitness age. That means a 50-year-old man conceivably could have a fitness age between 30 and 75, depending on his VO2max.

Knowing your fitness age could be instructive and perhaps sobering, but it also necessitates knowing your VO2max first, which few of us do. Precise measurement of aerobic capacity requires high-tech treadmill testing.

To work around that problem, the Norwegian scientists decided several years ago to develop an easy method for estimating VO2max. They recruited almost 5,000 Norwegians between the ages of 20 and 90, measured their aerobic capacity with treadmill testing and also checked a variety of health parameters, including waist circumference, heart rate and exercise habits.

They then determined that those parameters could, if plugged into an algorithm, provide a very close approximation of someone’s VO2max.

But while fitness age may give you bragging rights about your youthful vigor, the real question is whether it is a meaningful measurement in terms of longevity. Will having a younger fitness age add years to your life? Does an advanced fitness age mean you will die sooner?

The original Norwegian data did not show any direct correlation between fitness age and a longer life.

But in a new study, which was published in June in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the scientists turned to a large trove of data about more than 55,000 Norwegian adults who had completed extensive health questionnaires beginning in the 1980s. The scientists used the volunteers’ answers to estimate each person’s VO2max and fitness age.

Then they checked death records.

It turned out that people whose calculated VO2max was 85 percent or more below the average for their age — meaning that their fitness age was significantly above their chronological years — had an 82 percent higher risk of dying prematurely than those whose fitness age was the same as or more youthful than their actual age. According to the study’s authors, the results suggest that fitness age may predict a person’s risk of early death better than some traditional risk factors like being overweight, having high cholesterol levels or blood pressure, and smoking.

Of perhaps even greater immediate interest, the scientists used the data from this new study to refine and expand an online calculator for determining fitness age. An updated version went live this month. it asks only a few simple questions, including your age, gender, waist size and exercise routine, before providing you with your current fitness age. (I discovered my own fitness age is 15 years younger than my chronological age — a good number but still not as low as I could wish.)

Thankfully, fitness age can be altered, said Ulrik Wisloff, professor at the K.G. Jebsen Center for Exercise in Medicine at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who led the study. His advice if your fitness age exceeds your chronological years or is not as low as you would like? “Just exercise.”

Dr. Wisloff and his colleagues offer free exercise suggestions on their website. But he said almost any type and amount of exercise should help to increase your VO2max and lower your fitness age, potentially increasing your lifespan.

In upcoming studies, he added, he and his colleagues will directly compare how well fitness age stacks up against other, more established measures of mortality risk, like the Framingham Risk Calculator (which does not include exercise habits among its variables). They also hope to expand their studies to include more types of participants, since adult Norwegians may not be representative of all of the world’s population.

But even in advance of this additional data, there is no harm in learning and lowering your fitness age, Dr. Wisloff advised. “There is a huge benefit,” he said, “larger than any known medical treatment, in improving your fitness level to what is expected for your age group or, even better, to above it.”

 

For more information please go to spechtpt.com

By Gretchen Reynolds

                                               Zero-calorie sweeteners? Not so sweet....
                   Zero-calorie sweeteners may trigger blood sugar risk by screwing with gut bacteria

When artificial sweeteners are in the news, it’s rarely positive. In the last few years, sweeteners have been linked to everything from Type 2 diabetes to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and stroke. Still, products like Splenda and Sweet‘N Low remain a cornerstone of many a weight-loss strategy, mostly because doctors don’t quite understand how sweeteners contribute to disease. That may soon change, however, as results from a study, published today in Nature, point to a possible mechanism behind these adverse health effects.

"Our results suggest that in a subset of individuals, artificial sweeteners may affect the composition and function of the gut microbiome" in a way that would lead to high blood-sugar levels, said Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Health in Israel and a co-author of the study, during a press conference yesterday. This, the researchers say, is bad for human health because when sugar levels are high in the blood, the body can’t break it down, so it ends up being stored as fat.

High blood sugar ends up being stored as fat.

To reach these conclusions, Elinav and his team first tested the effect of three common artificial sweeteners — aspartame, sucralose, saccharin — on rodents. They found that each of the sweeteners induced a change in blood sugar levels that surpassed that of the mice who consumed actual sugar. And later tests involving the main sweetening agent in Sweet‘N Low, saccharin, yielded similar results in both lean and obese mice.

But mammals don’t actually digest artificial sweeteners — that’s why they’re "calorie-free" — so the reasons why these mice were experiencing blood-glucose alterations was still mysterious, Elinav said. Still, the researchers had an idea: maybe the bacteria that lived in the guts of the mice were interacting with the sweeteners.

So the researchers performed several experiments to test their idea. In one, they gave antibiotics to mice who had been fed sweeteners regularly. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria, and when these mice had their microbial guests cleaned out, their blood sugar levels went back to normal. In another experiment, the scientists transplanted feces — a rich source of gut microbes — from sweetener-fed mice into rodents that had never consumed artificial sweeteners. The procedure caused the recipient mice to experience oddly high blood glucose, like the mice in the sweetener group. Finally, Elinav and his colleagues used genetic analysis to reveal that alterations in the composition of microbial colonies were also accompanied by changes in bacterial function — changes that could very well explain why the mice were experiencing such high blood sugar.

Findings in mice aren't nearly as convincing as findings in people

But findings in mice aren’t nearly as convincing as findings in people, so the researchers set out to investigate human sweetener consumption. In the first experiment, the researchers analyzed the blood-sugar levels and gut bacteria colonies of 381 participants. And, as expected, Elinav and his colleagues found that people who consumed sweeteners in large quantities also showed disturbances in several metabolic parameters — including increased weight — as well as distinct microbial changes in their guts.

The results from the second, much smaller human experiment might actually be the most illuminating.

"We followed for a single week a group of seven human volunteers who do not consume sweeteners as part of their normal diet," Elinav said. During that period, the researchers gave them a single dose of saccharin, and monitored their vitals. After just four days, half the participants showed microbial alterations and increases in blood sugar levels, he explained, "while the other subset had no meaningful effect immediately following the consumption of sweeteners."

In other words: some people are more susceptible to the effects of artificial sweetener than others.

A causal link

The handful of studies suggest that consuming non-caloric artificial sweeteners boosts the risk glucose intolerance in both humans and mice, as a result of changes in gut microbe function, the researchers wrote in their report. Yet, because of the preliminary nature of their results and the small number of human participants involved, they stopped short of suggesting that people change their eating habits. "By no means are we prepared to make recommendations as to the use and dosage of artificial sweeteners based on the results of this study," said Eran Segal, a study co-author also at the Weizmann Institute of Health.

Other researchers, however, were more forthcoming.

"People need to be much more mindful of what they are eating and drinking and make efforts to avoid products that have added sweeteners in any form" said Susan Swithers, a behavioral neuroscientist at Purdue University who wasn’t part of the Nature study, in an email to The Verge. The studies showed not only a causal link between the changes in the gut and artificial sweeteners, but that the observed changes happen quickly, she wrote.

"People need to be much more mindful of what they are eating and drinking."

Not everyone agrees with the design the researchers used to address the question about artificial sweeteners and weight gain. Christopher Gardner, a food scientist at Stanford University who didn’t participate in the study, says that the fact that the researchers gave the FDA's maximal acceptable daily intake of saccharin to the human participants — about 5 mg / kg body weight per day — isn’t ideal. In a real-life setting, that dose would be the equivalent to a 150-pound person consuming 42 12-ounce sodas per day, or 8.5 packets of pink Sweet 'n Low per day. "That may be ‘acceptable’ according to some set of guidelines," Gardner wrote in an email, "but it should be noted that realistically this is a very high dose they are using and one that wouldn't be consumed by a typical consumer."

Still, the idea that we might finally have an explanation for the adverse health effects seen in certain sweetener studies is worth paying attention to. Should the findings prove reproducible, doctors will be tasked with understanding why some people are susceptible to microbiome alterations, while others aren’t. And sweetener companies will have to address the criticism — in addition to rethinking their marketing strategies. "The work is important," Swithers said, "because it underscores the role that artificial sweeteners may play in contributing to the very problems they were designed to help."

By Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Sit Less, Live Longer? 

That's what the research shows.... Our front desk staff now uses adjustable desks from www.geekdesk.com that allow standing or sitting at work. Improves overall health and reduces back/neck pain. We walk our talk!! #geekdesk

If people need motivation to get up from their office chairs or couches and become less sedentary, two useful new studies could provide the impetus. One found that sitting less can slow the aging process within cells, and the other helpfully underscores that standing up — even if you are standing still — can be good for you as well. 

For most of us nowadays, sitting is our most common waking activity, with many of us sitting for eight hours or more every day. Even people who exercise for an hour or so tend to spend most of the remaining hours of the day in a chair.

The health consequences of this sedentariness are well-documented. Past studies have found that the more hours that people spend sitting, the more likely they are to develop diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, and potentially to die prematurely — even if they exercise regularly.

But most of these studies were associational, meaning that they found a link between sitting and illness, but could not prove whether or how sitting actually causes ill health. 

So for the most groundbreaking of the new studies, which was published this month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, scientists in Sweden decided to mount an actual experiment, in which they would alter the amount of time that people spent exercising and sitting, and track certain physiological results. In particular, with this experiment, the scientists were interested in whether changes in sedentary time would affect people’s telomeres.

If you are unfamiliar with the componentry of your genes, telomeres are the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands. They shorten and fray as a cell ages, although the process is not strictly chronological. Obesity, illness and other conditions can accelerate the shortening, causing cells to age prematurely, while some evidence suggests that healthy lifestyles may preserve telomere length, delaying cell aging. 

For the new experiment, the Swedish scientists recruited a group of sedentary, overweight men and women, all aged 68, and drew blood, in order to measure the length of telomeres in the volunteers’ white blood cells. Then half of the volunteers began an individualized, moderate exercise program, designed to improve their general health. They also were advised to sit less.

The other volunteers were told to continue with their normal lives, although the scientists urged them to try to lose weight and be healthy, without offering any specific methods. 

After six months, the volunteers all returned for a second blood draw and to complete questionnaires about their daily activities. These showed that those in the exercise group were, not surprisingly, exercising more than they had been previously. But they were also, for the most part, sitting substantially less than before. 

And when the scientists compared telomeres, they found that the telomeres in the volunteers who were sitting the least had lengthened. Their cells seemed to be growing physiologically younger.

Meanwhile, in the control group telomeres generally were shorter than they had been six months before. 

But perhaps most interesting, there was little correlation between exercise and telomere length. In fact, the volunteers in the exercise group who had worked out the most during the past six months tended now to have slightly less lengthening and even some shortening, compared to those who had exercised less but stood up more. 

Reducing sedentary time had lengthened telomeres, the scientists concluded, while exercising had played little role. 

Exactly what the volunteers did in lieu of sitting is impossible to say with precision, said Per Sjögren, a professor of public health at Uppsala University in Sweden, who led the study, because the researchers did not track their volunteers’ movement patterns with monitors. But “it’s most likely,” he said, that “sitting time was predominantly replaced with low-intensity activities,” and in particular with time spent standing up. 

Which makes the second new study of sedentary behavior particularly relevant. Standing is not, after all, physically demanding for most people, and some scientists have questioned whether merely standing up — without also moving about and walking — is sufficiently healthy or if standing merely replaces one type of sedentariness with another.

If so, standing could be expected to increase health problems and premature death, as sitting has been shown to do. 

To find out whether that situation held true, Peter Katzmarzyk, a professor of public health at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and an expert on sedentary behavior, turned to a large database of self-reported information about physical activity among Canadian adults. He noted the amount of time that the men and women had reported standing on most days over the course of a decade or more and crosschecked that data with death records, to see whether people who stood more died younger. 

The results, published in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, are soothing if predictable. Dr. Katzmarzyk found no link between standing and premature death. Rather, as he writes in the study, “mortality rates declined at higher levels of standing,” suggesting that standing is not sedentary or hazardous, a conclusion with which our telomeres would likely concur. 

 Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

For more information on how to keep moving visit spechtpt.com

 

 

To ease severe back pain, quit smoking

Posted by Leslie Orr-Rochester on December 7, 2012

U. ROCHESTER (US) — Quitting smoking offers significant relief to people suffering from severe back pain, new research suggests.

Published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, the study analyzed more than 5,300 patients followed for eight months during treatment of spinal disorders and showed that cigarette smokers reported far more pain than never-smokers or those who had quit.

Smoking cessation either prior to treatment or during the course of care was related to significant improvements in pain—a result that underlines the need for structured stop-smoking programs among the legions of patients who experience back pain due to degenerative disease, deformity, or musculoskeletal problems.

“We found that people who stopped smoking had meaningful benefit by reduction of their pain,” says Caleb Behrend, chief resident in the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “The pain improvement is in addition to all the other benefits you gain from quitting.”

The relationship between pain and smoking is complex and full of contradictions. Nicotine has analgesic properties, for example, and yet clinical evidence shows that smokers are at higher risk for developing back pain and other chronic pain disorders, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

Scientists already know that nicotine interacts with a family of proteins (nAChR), which have a key role in the central, and peripheral nervous system, and control anxiety and pain. Prolonged exposure to cigarettes upsets the function of these cells and eventually changes the way pain is processed, as well as impairing oxygen delivery to tissues, predisposing a person to bone and joint disorders such as osteoporosis, and inducing inflammation and depression. Smokers with spinal conditions also tend to have persistently more intense pain and more long-term disability.

he new study notes a daunting fact: Nearly all people will experience back pain at some point in their lives and many will seek medical care. Because the socioeconomic impact of spinal disorders (cost of care and lost productivity for patients) is so great, researchers want to find out if improvements in pain could be achieved with a cost-effective intervention such as smoking cessation.Researchers reviewed a prospectively maintained database of 5,333 patients, who completed questionnaires about pain at the initial doctors’ visit and at the time of discharge from care. Patients were treated with surgery, or with physical therapy, injections, over-the-counter medications, and home exercise programs. Physicians counseled all smokers to quit, and patients were referred to a smoking cessation hotline.

Of the 5,333 people, those who had never smoked or had quit some time ago reported less pain than smokers or those who had just quit. By the end of the follow-up period, the people who had recently quit or who quit during treatment showed significant improvements in pain. People who continued to smoke during treatment had no improvement in pain on all scales.

Younger people tended to comprise the group of current smokers and those who only decided to quit during treatment; this is consistent with other studies showing that smoking is associated with degenerative spine disease at a younger age.

Older patients tended to comprise the group who had never smoked or quit long ago.

The rate of smoking cessation was 22 percent, and research shows that up to 36 percent of patients with painful spinal disorders are able to quit with help from a structured program. A grant from the Southwestern Medical Foundation was used to create and maintain the patient database.

Source: University of Rochester

For more information on back pain, please visit spechtpt.com

Zach Pereira earns Orthopaedic Specialist Certification!

Swansea, MA – Specht Physical Therapy Physical Therapist Zachary Pereira was certified as a Clinical Specialist in Orthopedic Physical Therapy (OCS) by the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties (ABPTS). Roughly 6.5% of the physical therapists in the United States are Board Certified in a specialty and only 3.9% of therapists in the United States are Orthopedic Certified Specialists.

Board certification is granted by the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialists (ABPTS) and involves a rigorous examination process and provides assurance to patients and the medical community of a therapist’s skills and abilities.

Pereira is recognized for advanced knowledge, experience, and skills in the practice of orthopedic physical therapy and the conditions affecting bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, muscles and nerves. Similar to physician specialization, there are eight specialty areas in which physical therapists can be board certified. Those with this advanced certification are considered to have great depth of knowledge and skills in their specialty area of physical therapy.

“The certification process reaffirms my enthusiasm and dedication to continue pursuing the highest level of skill with which to best serve patients in Swansea and the surrounding area” Pereira said.  Mr. Pereira obtained his Masters in Physical Therapy from Springfield College in 2007 and joined the Specht Physical Therapy staff in 2009.

 Specht Physical Therapy is a privately owned physical therapy clinic in Swansea, Massachusetts dedicated to helping people of all ages get back to what they enjoy. For more information please contact Greg Specht, Clinical Director at Specht Physical Therapy at 508-675-3200 or visit our website at www.spechtpt.com.