Heart Disease And Your Posture
“Here’s How Heart Disease Relates To Your Posture”
For those of you who have investigated chiropractic to one degree or another, you probably have an idea of our claims about how your posture can affect the health of your internal organs.
For those of you who do not believe such a connection exists, or you are not totally convinced that such a connection exists, then this is just for you.
This was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in October of 2004.
This journal is one of the most read & most reputable journals in the world in the field of medicine.
TITLE: Hyperkyphotic Posture Predicts Mortality in Older Community-Dwelling Men and Women: A Prospective Study
The objectives of this study were to determine the association between hyperkyphotic posture and rate of mortality & cause-specific mortality in older persons.
Hyperkyphotic posture is when you have a hump in your upper spine and/or you have forward head posture. This hump has been called a widowers hump in the past but the scary thing is that it is now quite prevalent in young adults & even teenagers due to the huge increase in modern technology injuries now affecting our society.
The study was conducted by several doctors from the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Diego.
The subjects of the study were 1353 residents of a retirement dwelling in Rancho Bernardo, California who had measurements of hyperkyphotic posture discovered during an osteoporosis assessment.
The participants were followed for an average of 4.2 years, with mortality & cause of death confirmed using review of death certificates.
The conclusion: “ … persons with hyperkyphotic posture had a 1.44 greater rate of mortality. “ In other words, older men and older women with poor posture have higher mortality rates, which means they die sooner. And when they investigated cause-specific mortality analysis ( ie. what did these people actually die from? ), “ hyperkyphotic posture was specifically associated with an increase rate of death due to atherosclerosis.”
So, what this means is that when you have poor posture, specifically hyperkyphosis ( forward head posture &/or hump back ), you will die sooner from a heart attack or some type of heart disease.
Now, remember that this was published in one of the most reputable journals in the world in the medical field. But, did your family doctor tell you about this? Most of them do read these types of journals, by the way. And, how important do you think it is to know that poor posture can actually cause you to have a heart attack? I am sure that most of you will agree that it is very important to know and now you do.
So, what should you do now?
What you should do is take the measures to find out if you are at risk. And this is where a chiropractic assessment is in high order. Remember that posture & spinal health is our specialty & we can easily determine your degree of risk using a computerized posture scan and a simple xray.
And at what age should you do this? As soon as you are old enough to use a cell phone, video game or computer because one of the biggest concerns with modern technology injuries is forward head posture &/or hump back; a major cause of heart disease as you now know. Never has the old saying ‘as the twig is bent, so grows the tree’ been more fitting.
At Life Chiropractic, we use an advanced approach to specifically diagnose & treat forward head posture & hump back. And why we focus so much on this is because heart disease is now becoming a very serious concern in our younger generations.
But what is really scary is it is now estimated that 40% of the time, your first symptom that you have heart disease is a fatal heart attack! [Fatal means you do not get a second chance.]
To schedule an appointment for your free initial consultation is easy. All you have to do is call us at 905 335 LIFE ( 5433 ).
We will even include the computerized posture scan and remember that family appointments are also available.
The reason that we recommend family appointments is because subluxations ( these are what cause forward head posture & hump back ) run in families, so it is critical that we check all your children as well.
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