Page 11 - Prevention - USA (April 2020)

A New Look at

Lower Back Pain

If you blame good old aging for your aches
and pains, you might not be too far off.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine
sought to determine what was behind lower
back pain in older people and found that
“Swiss cheese bones” may be to blame. The 70 TH
scientists genetically aged mice to be the
ANNIVERSARY
human equivalent of 70 or 80 years old and
found that spinal tissue that was normally The First
soft and cartilaginous became hardened, Earth Day:
porous bony structures; they suspect that We Were There!
this could lead to pain because the spaces
allow nerves to grow where they normally Fifty years ago, Prevention—
a brand already associated
wouldn’t. Researchers hope the findings and
with the health of people and
future research could lead to new treatments
to target lower back pain in humans (and the planet—supported Earth
Day from the get-go. At the
possibly ways to prevent it).
time, many of the messages
around the day had to do with
pollution rather than climate
change, but the editors’ first
Earth Day plea still resonates:
“Look at each dirty, polluted
part of the world and you will
see—through the murk—a
failure of human thinking. Why
should we ever think we can
zoom around the country and
into every part of every city
with 300 horsepower horse-
less carriages and not spread
manure of some sort?…Start
thinking about what pollution
really means to you. If we are
to reverse the tide of pollution,
GETTY IMAGES. start in our own minds. Think
the force for that effort must

a little, act a little, then go
back and think some more.”

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