Running for your back, but not vitamin D for your heart..
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What does the new Deakin University study reveal about jogging and back health?
Hello and welcome to this week's health report with me, Norman Swan. Today, vitamin D supplements in your heart. Another win for keyhole surgery in women, how things are changing in the resuscitation of newborn babies in the labour ward, and also in the care of preterm babies, and jogging and your back. Most people will suffer an episode of back pain sometime in their lives, often more than one. It's a huge cause of lost days at work and medical costs, not to mention the disability that can be involved. Now you can find experts who say that jogging is poison for the back because it pummels the spine. But a world first study from Deakin University on the effects of jogging and running on intervertebral discs suggests otherwise.
The lead author is Daniel Bellavy and he's in our Melbourne studio. Welcome to the Health Report.
Good evening, Norman.
So tell us about this study.
Well, uh as you introduced, uh, back pain is a massive problem for Australian society and um uh it it's the the leading cause of of uh disability and lost productivity in the country, even if even when you account for for more deaths due to other diseases. And in managing this sort of issue, um what uh I wanted to look at was to see you can we find ways to, for example, strengthen the disks in the back and the The conventional wisdom in the in the research field is is that either you can't or if there is an effect that it's going to be too slow to have a meaningful effect in a person's life. Aaron Powell And also there was no evidence that whilst there was some evidence in animals, there was no evidence in humans that exercise did make a difference.
And also there was no Precisa did make a difference. Precisely. And that's the thing is that what might what might happen or be irrelevant in a in an animal mightn't be the case in humans because they're not talking Because they're met. And we're talking
and we're talking about the shock absorbers between
this the vertebrae, the bones and the spine. Precisely, yeah. And as as you said, the animals uh the s research has been done with them before. But their metabolism a lot is a lot faster and also they walk on all fours. And whether that applies then to humans is not on the matter. So tell us what you did in the study. Well, what I decided to do is to to look at certain kinds of physical physical activity that we think are possibly going to be at the very worst not detrimental to the spine at high volumes, um or that might be beneficial. Now based upon this work from animals and also from uh from other studies we've seen before, I thought that uh examining walking or running uh might be a good way to see
Of young people well, y relatively young people, twenty five, thirty five, men and women with varying levels of activity. Tell us about the varying levels of activity.
Well, we had obviously a bun a a group of people who didn't do any support, any sport at all. They were they were healthy, right? They had no back problems at all, but they just were simply um not involved in any regular physical activity. And then we had a a group of people who uh regularly run marathons, so running at least fifty kilometers a week, um and doing that for at least five years. Um and also a group of people who were regular joggers, so running twenty twenty to forty kilometers a week, but And also for at least five years, but also again, no other kind of sports. We just looked at people who just ran. So triathletes and so forth we didn't look at.
And you did M R I's on their banks. Yeah. What did you find?
Well so this is not a randomized trial, this is just a effect was seeing what the effect was because I mean when you because there's no data before it all in h in humans, before you go off and do the randomized control trial, you need to see if if there is any kind of effect at all. And this is the the back in the in the in the um studies of um on bone in the late eighties and early nineties, you needed that first cross sectional study between different types of sports or different types of athletic groups um to see if there was a difference.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What does the new Deakin University study reveal about jogging and back health?
0:00–4:15
2
How did the researchers compare disc health among non‑runners, joggers and marathoners?
4:15–8:00
3
What were the key findings on disc hydration and size from the running study?
8:00–12:54
4
Does high‑dose vitamin D supplementation protect the heart and reduce cardiovascular events?
12:54–19:12
5
What were the results of the New Zealand high‑dose vitamin D trial on heart disease and stroke?
19:12–24:48
6
How have newborn resuscitation practices changed to improve outcomes for babies?
24:48–28:46
Speakers
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