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Spinal
Curvature Not Life-Threatening: U.S. Study Wed
Feb 5,10:29 AM ET CHICAGO (Reuters) - Curvature of the
spine, or scoliosis, may lead to chronic back pain for many but it is not a
serious threat to health, researchers said on Tuesday. Previous studies have suggested that
scoliosis, in which vertebrae bend to the side and the spine sometimes forms an
S-shape, may pinch internal organs such as the lungs or create an over-large
cavity for the heart to fill, leading to early death. But a follow-up survey of 117
people--104 of whom were women--who had been diagnosed with scoliosis between
1932 and 1948 and who had not been treated surgically found a half-century later
that their mortality rate was no higher than average. Over the past decade only three of 36
deaths in the study group might have been attributable to scoliosis, said study
author Stuart Weinstein of the University of Iowa. "We did not find evidence to
link untreated (scoliosis) with increased rates of mortality in general or from
cardiac or pulmonary conditions potentially related to the curvature," said
the report appearing in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical
Association. The survey polled people with the
most common type of spinal curvature, late-onset idiopathic scoliosis, which
appears during adolescence and is likely an inherited, though mysterious,
deformity. Curvature of the spine also can occur if one leg is shorter than the
other, if muscles on one side of the back are weaker than the other, or after an
injury. Spinal curvature is sometimes halted
with a body cast or corrected by fusing vertebrae or inserting a metal rod in
the back, but the condition often goes untreated unless the curvature is
extreme. Nearly two-thirds of the scoliosis
sufferers reported chronic back pain, about twice the proportion as in a control
group of volunteers who did not have the condition, but the pain was usually
mild to moderate and few took medications to quell it. Twenty-two percent of the
scoliosis sufferers reported shortness of breath, a figure that was close to the
15% reported in the control group. |