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Complex posture and disc herniation – lifting properly important

Posture

Posture and Loading

In a signature paper by Broom et al. 1 these authors set out to investigate the effects of complex posture within the act of loading.

They used thirty seven motion segments of ovine lumbar spines and subjected them to compressive loading to simulate the event that a human may experience when they bend and twist while lifting a heavy object. What they found was the more complex (meaning more rotation) the angles were, the more likely they saw ruptures within the intervertebral disc.

These injuries were looked at with microstructural analysis with light microscopy and they saw pockets of nucleus pulposus between the annulus fibrous with evidence of delamination. They saw convoluted paths of injury which displaced the nucleus more so in the complex loading environment. They also saw how the nucleus tracked laterally and then in a circumferential pattern.

Conclusions

The authors concluded that postures do matter when it comes to loading the disc. And their bottom line is to keep the spine square if you want to avoid an injury that relates to a disc herniation.

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