Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor • May 2019 • News And Events

Packed into a mini van and armed with bicycles, helmets and a passion for health, four students enrolled at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC) are dedicating their summer to challenging Canadian youth from coast to coast to live a healthier and more active lifestyle.

The students will take on a big challenge this summer: cycling across Canada! Sefrah Daviduck, Lauryn Friesen, Justin Reay and Garrett Duff are first- and second-year students who make up the CMCC team “Unleash Your Potential.”

Unleash Your Potential is a national health and wellness campaign and cross-Canada cycling tour seeking to motivate, inspire and educate Canadian youth. This biannual student run initiative started in 2005. All recruits are students attending the CMCC in Toronto. The students who were part of the cycling tour in 2017 took part in choosing the new candidates for the cycling tour of 2019. The team has spent the last year and a half fundraising through events held at the school as well as through donations from individuals and corporate sponsors. They will begin their trip in Tofino, BC during the last week of May, and expect to finish by mid August in St. John’s Newfoundland.

According to Canadian statistics, childhood obesity rates continue to rise each year – the Public Health Agency in 2017 stated 60 per cent of children aged 5 to 17 years are overweight or obese, and only one-third of children are meeting daily physical activity recommendations. Throughout the summer, Unleash Your Potential members will dismount from their bikes and stop at schools and visit children’s programs in the hope of reducing these statistics. The goal of Unleash Your Potential is to empower youth to start taking control of their wellness by making healthy choices in their everyday lives. The team will present and discuss with Canadian youth strategies that they can integrate into their own lives to become more physically active, gain more knowledge about nutrition, and strategies to incorporate these new habits into their daily routines.

This year’s team is extremely excited to have been chosen to participate in such an incredible and once in a lifetime experience. They feel privileged to have the opportunity to spend a summer being active while having the chance to explore our beautiful country from coast to coast. All team members are looking forward to communicating with Canadian youth the importance of staying active at a young age and continuing healthy habits throughout their entire life. They also hope to introduce an awareness of the positive influence that chiropractic care can create for them in the future.

The team is diverse in their strengths and skills and look forward to collaborating to make this summer filled with education for youth, biking, and long-lasting memories. To learn more visit unleashyours.ca

Advances in pain research are yielding new insights into mysteries lurking inside the brain and how brain mechanisms influence chronic pain. However, a senior official at the National Institutes of Health, says let’s not forget how muscles and other tissues in the body can be successfully treated to help alleviate low-back pain and other chronic pain conditions.

Helene Langevin, M.D. serves as director, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. She has devoted her career to studying the benefits of various physical therapies, such as acupuncture, massage, yoga and stretching, to promote overall wellness and help improve quality of life for people coping with chronic pain.

“Pain research in the past few decades has strengthened our view of chronic pain as a disease of the brain,” Langevin said. “As a result, some of the newer treatment approaches focus on ways to target neural pain pathways to help achieve relief. While this is important research, the brain isn’t the whole story in pain management.”

Langevin noted that more studies are needed to explore the benefits of mind and body therapies to reduce inflammation and prevent long-term muscle and tissue damage that can lead to chronic pain. “When pain after an injury lasts more than three months, patients are often told the tissues have healed and the brain is responsible for the ongoing pain,” said Langevin. “But have the tissues really healed, and what tissues are we talking about?”

Langevin is concerned about research gaps in the interface of growing neuroscience knowledge with understanding of the rest of the body. “Studies of mind and body therapies can give valuable insights into chronic musculoskeletal and low-back pain, for example, as a dynamic interplay between the nervous system and musculoskeletal tissues,” she said.

Langevin also said one of the reasons low-back pain is so difficult to manage may be that we are not paying enough attention to structural restrictions of connective tissue that can impair muscle function over time.

Ultrasound studies in Langevin’s lab revealed connective tissues surrounding back muscles are thicker in people with chronic low back pain.

“Connective tissues surrounding muscles in the back normally have alternating layers of fibers that handle substantial loads and glide easily. People with longstanding low-back pain have decreased gliding motion between connective tissue layers, which could contribute to functional impairment,” Langevin explained. “Interventions that restore connective tissue mobility and muscle function may be important to prevent long-term damage to vulnerable structures such as joints and intervertebral discs.”

According to Langevin, complementary medicine clinicians have long emphasized the importance of connective tissues in health and disease. “Connective tissue is the scaffold that holds our body together,” she said. “Stretching and other manual-and movement-based therapies are grounded on the assumption that connective-tissue pathology contributes to musculoskeletal pain, and that mind and body approaches can help both reduce pain and improve function. We need to understand better how muscles, connective tissue, and the nervous system all contribute to musculoskeletal pain and how to address this in an integrative way”.

In a new study conducted in rats, researchers found a four-week period of rest was nearly as effective as an experimental drug at reducing discomfort and regaining function after an injury from repeated moderate- strain activity. The findings are relevant to treating common musculoskeletal disorders caused by overuse.

“Rest appears to be a good first treatment choice,” said Amanda White, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Temple University who conducted the research along with Mary Barbe, PhD, professor at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine. “Other treatments following rest should include exercises to improve tissues, and pain reducers if needed.”

The researchers trained rats to repeatedly pull a lever in order to model the types of repetitive-strain injuries humans experience. After 12 weeks, the rats showed a weaker grip strength, discomfort and increased collagen production in the forearm– evidence of strain -induced tissue damage. The researchers then allowed the rats to rest for four weeks. During this rest period one group of rats received an experimental drug that blocks a neurotransmitter, Substance P, which is associated with the sensation of pain, while the other group did not.

“We found that the fourweek rest treatment reduced collagen production, improved strength and decreased discomfort,” said White. “The drug blocking Substance P signaling also had similar effects, and was somewhat better at improving grip strength, but at the same time made the animals less sensitive to very hot temperatures, which is concerning. This led us to conclude that rest may be the better treatment.”

There appears, however, to be a tipping point at which rest is not sufficient and medications are needed. While the new study showed rest was sufficient for recovering from repeated moderate-strain activity, previous studies indicated it was not sufficient when the lever was harder to pull, causing more strain.

In investigating the Substance P-blocking agent and other drugs, the researchers are focused on developing ways to help the tissue actually recover from overuse- induced injury, not just relieve pain. In previous experiments the researchers tried giving the rats ibuprofen and other pain relievers while they were performing the lever-pulling task; however, this seemed to only mask the pain while allowing the rats to continue to pull hard, worsening the tissue damage.There are several ongoing studies examining other medications and exercises that may aid in recovery after overuse-induced MSK disorders.

Acetaminophen is one of the most widely used pain relievers. Almost 60 years of widespread use have made acetaminophen a household product . It ’s distributed over the counter (OTC) in most countries and judged safe by the scientific community. However, acetaminophen is also one of the most common medications involved in overdoses and is the most common cause of druginduced liver failure.

Surprisingly, we are only now coming to understand how acetaminophen works--and recent research shows that we may need to develop a better understanding of the need for caution when using acetaminophen, especially when it comes to avoiding some of the risks associated with its use. Past research suggests these can range from increased asthma to interactions with other medications or the risk for developing other health concerns (such as kidney toxicity, bone fractures, or blood cancers).

Another important reason to look more carefully at all medications is that our bodies may react to these treatments differently as we age. Older adults experience physical changes as they age including, for example, reduced muscle mass, more fat tissue, changes in body composition, and less fluid in the body systems. Older people may also have multiple chronic conditions and take several different medications. These issues affect many different body functions, and that can raise your risk of having an unwanted reaction to a medication.

For all these reasons, a team of researchers decided to study the safety of acetaminophen in a nursing home setting. Their study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The researchers’ aim was to explore any connection between acetaminophen use, death, and major heart events such as strokes and heart attacks in a large group of older adults living in nursing homes in southwestern France.

The researchers used information from the IQUARE study, which relied on two different questionnaires completed online by nursing home staffers. The researchers looked at deaths, heart attacks, and strokes that took place during the 18 months of the study period.

Of the 5,429 participants in the study, 3,190 were not taking acetaminophen and 2,239 were taking acetaminophen . Participants were around 86 years old and 74 per cent were women.

The researchers reported that acetaminophen did not affect the number of heart attacks the participants experienced. There also was no increase in overall deaths.

The researchers found that the number of strokes was about the same in both groups – about 5 per cent of the people who took acetaminophen had strokes, while about 4 per cent of those who did not take acetaminophen had strokes. However, in participants who had diabetes, there was a slightly higher risk for stroke among people who took acetaminophen.

The researchers concluded that acetaminophen is a safe first choice in pain management for most older adults but should be considered with a bit more caution for older adults with diabetes.

As the population gets older and frailer, studies need to focus on the safety of the drugs these frail older adults commonly use to better our practice, said the researchers.

“My personal message to the people in my everyday practice is that any drug they take may have some form of harmful side effect unknown to them, even those they can buy over the counter. It is always best to check with your health care provider before you take any new medication, and make sure you’re taking the dose that’s right for you,” said study author Philippe Gerard, MD.

People in almost every region of the world could benefit from rebalancing their diets to eat optimal amounts of various foods and nutrients, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, which tracked trends in consumption of 15 dietary factors from 1990 to 2017 in 195 countries, and was published in The Lancet.

The study estimates that one in five deaths globally – equivalent to 11 million deaths – are associated with poor diet, and diet contributes to a range of chronic diseases in people around the world. In 2017, more deaths were caused by diets with too low amounts of foods such as whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds, than by diets with high levels of foods like trans fats, sugary drinks, and high levels of red and processed meats.

The findings highlight the urgent need for coordinated global efforts to improve diet, through collaboration with various sections of the food system and policies that drive balanced diets.

“This study affirms what many have thought for several years – that poor diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor in the world,” says study author Dr Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, USA. “While sodium, sugar, and fat have been the focus of policy debates over the past two decades, our assessment suggests the leading dietary risk factors are high intake of sodium, or low intake of healthy foods, such as whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds, and vegetables.