Poor posture causing bone growth in skull

Books Wednesday 26/June/2019 20:08 PM
By: Times News Service
Poor posture causing bone growth in skull

Sydney: Poor posture due to the excessive use of new technology could be causing bony lumps to grow at the back of young adults' skulls according to research from Australia.

A study published by Dr David Shahar and Associate Professor Mark Sayers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland showed aberrant postures are causing young people to develop a bone-growth at the back of the skull.

According to the university, the study involved 218 x-rays of people aged between 18-30-years-old and found that 41 percent had developed a 10-30 millimetre bony lump at the back of their school.

Dr Shahar was quoted by the university as saying, "This is evidence that musculoskeletal degenerative processes can start and progress silently from an early age.

"These findings were surprising because typically they take years to develop and are more likely to be seen in the ageing population."

He added, "We hypothesise that the sustained increase load at that muscle attachment is due to the weight of the head shifting forward with the use of modern technologies for long periods of time.

"Shifting the head forwards results in the transfer of teh head's weight from the bones of the spine to the muscles at the back of the neck and head.

“The increased load prompts remodelling on both the tendon and the bony ends of the attachment. The tendon’s footprint on the bone becomes wider to distribute the load on a larger surface area of the bone.”

Dr Sayers said, "The thing is that the bump is not the problem, the bump is a sign of sustained terrible posture, which can be corrected quite simply,” Dr Sayers said.

According to the university, Dr Sayers stated that the answer was to balance mobile phone use with recalibration of body posture, use specially contoured pillows or do exercises that involved lifting the upper chest.