Serious Thinking

The fellow INESC TECcolleagues and the back problems...

by Catarina Carvalho¨

Hello everyone! My name is Catarina Brito Carvalho and I work at C-BER for over a year now. One of my life purposes (or maybe an obsession) is to be as healthy as possible.

Through this chronicle, (I think I can put it this way) I will address a health problem that I think that affects some of the fellow INESC TEC colleagues. This is one of the most commonly neglected health problems, know as Back pain. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately*), the technological evolution led our fellow INESC TEC colleagues to be seated for hours and hours developing their works. The routine of a fellow INESC TEC colleague is mainly composed of the following travels: 1) travelling to the desk and sit to work; 2) travelling to drink coffee; 3) travelling to sit and have lunch; 4) travelling to sit and have a snack (this “travels” being dependant on the group/centre/cluster). To make the situation worse, many of us make the home-work trip using public transportation (seated) or their car (while seated, naturally**).

As you can understand in this not very interesting description and that verges on the boredom, of the eight hours of work (or more) that we spend in INESC TEC, maybe six or six and half of them we spend them while being seated. Adding to this number the travel periods we spend maybe seven hours seated (at best). Of course, we all like to relax and unwind after a day of work, so when we arrive at home we spend a few hours sitting on the couch watching TV, because it feels so good.

In short, the sedentary lifestyle levels associated with our kind of work, aggravated by long periods of inactivity in the free time, may be responsible for the development of several health problems, such as cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and cancer [1-4]. In addition to these consequences, one of the problems associated with the high sedentary lifestyle is the "back pain", "low back pain", or as I like to call mine pain "inflammation of the piriformis" :).

This type of pathology happens because, when we are seated, we relax the back muscles and the abdominal muscles, which makes us gain a bent posture. The lordosis (physiological curvature of the spine) that we should keep all day (shoulders back, chest forward and belly in), is thus completely "destroyed". In the end, we spend the day contracting muscles that we shouldn’t, leading to inflammation and pain in certain regions of the back.

This type of back pain tends to get worse over time and you have to say "ENOUGH" and quickly. One of the healthier attitudes to make is to increase the levels of physical activity. This increase of physical activity can involve activities such as hiking (just like the INESC TEC on foot initiative), playing football, swimming (all orthopaedists recommend), running (FEUP + FCUP have a good running track) or going to the gym. Lucky for us, we have three good (and also cheap) gyms next to us that allows us to have access to group or bodybuilding classes and/or classes with a personal trainer. These are normally open from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. and their proximity and flexibility of schedules makes it quite easy to go to the gym before or after work.

Of course, when you go to the gym, after a long time of inactivity, you will leave it feeling worse than when you entered ;). But do not worry, after a few days of having difficulties in walking, you will see that your back will thank you and all your physical condition, mood and energy will improve significantly.

I hope I have made some of you interested in trying out some exercising and I’m available for any conversation about this chronicle.

* Who would want to be harvesting with 40º in Alentejo?

** Here is an interesting idea. Would it be possible to develop a car with people standing instead of being seated? Maybe this work would have merit for a Nobel Prize ;).

 ¨ Collaborator of C-BER - Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research

___________

[1] Kim, Y., Wilkens, L. R., Park, S.-Y., Goodman, M. T., Monroe, K. R., & Kolonel, L. N. (2013). Association between various sedentary behaviours and all-cause, cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality: the Multiethnic Cohort Study. International Journal of Epidemiology, 42(4), 1040–1056. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyt108

[2] Ekelund, U., Steene-Johannessen, J., Brown, W. J., Fagerland, M. W., Owen, N., Powell, K. E., … Lancet Sedentary Behaviour Working Group. (2016). Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women. The Lancet, 388(10051), 1302–1310. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30370-1

[3] Warren, T. Y., Barry, V., Hooker, S. P., Sui, X., Church, T. S., & Blair, S. N. (2010). Sedentary behaviors increase risk of cardiovascular disease mortality in men. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 42(5), 879–885. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0b013e3181c3aa7e

[4] van der Ploeg, H. P., Chey, T., Korda, R. J., Banks, E., & Bauman, A. (2012). Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in 222 497 Australian Adults. Archives of Internal Medicine, 172(6), 494. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2011.2174