Health
Tall Health - Health matters for tall people
Being Tall Back Pain and Posture Problems
Your back has a natural "S" curve. You want to keep your body aligned to preserve this "S" curve. When you slouch, your back deforms into a "C" curve. This puts pressure on the disks and causes back pain and eventually damage to the discs. If you are tall and bending your neck down to look at your work, you will quickly have neck and shoulder pain. You are probably so used to this pain you just thought it was part of being tall. Adjust your monitor so that your head is balanced straight. Be sure to set your seat height correctly to preserve your natural "S" curve in your back and then move your surroundings up to support your correct body alignment.
Tall Guy Quirky Fact
The average height of a person decreases, on average, 15mm over the course of the day i.e. a 1% loss of height from morning to evening. Spinal discs, are composed largely of water. The discs rest between the spinal bones, or vertabrae. These intervertebral discs are compressed as we stand - it is our own body weight that compresses the intervertebral disc. When sleeping, the compressive pressure is relieved, and the discs expand again. Fact!
Being Tall May Raise Prostate Cancer Risk
The long and short of it is that if you're a tall or leggy man, you may have a slightly higher risk of developing prostate cancer than men of more modest height.And if you do get prostate cancer, there's a somewhat greater chance that it will be a more aggressive type. That's the conclusion of British researchers, who looked at data on more than 9,000 men and found that the taller they come, the higher the prostate cancer risk, and the better the odds that the cancer will be a more serious high-grade form. Compared with other risk factors for prostate cancer, such as age and race, being height-advantaged adds only slightly to a man's chances of developing the disease. Some of the factors that make men tall may also raise their prostate cancer risk, says researcher Lisa Zucolo, MSc, a PhD candidate in the department of social medicine at Bristol University in England. "A better growth, and possibly a more rapid growth, we find associated with a very modest increase in risk of prostate cancer and a slightly greater risk of more progressive disease," Zucolo tells WebMD. The study should not, however, be cause for concern among the altitudinally gifted, says Andy D'Omico, MD, PhD, chief of genitourinary radiation oncology at the Brigham Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
At this early stage of investigation, it's hard to know if and how the findings of this study might change prostate cancer screening of treatment. Further research is needed to confirm this study's results and to determine the relationship between height and the development of prostate cancer.