Re: Vibration Therapy to boost BMD for CR folks?

[Guest guest]

Hi Bruce:

It is said the people with the strongest bones are weight lifters and

squash players.

The former suggests squats may be beneficial, provided one lifts

amounts that are less than those that would cause a compression

fracture of a vertebra! Serious issue!

The latter fits in nicely with your vibration therapy. There is also

another exercise that can be done with similar effect, and does not

require equipment. It is termed 'drop-jumps'.

In principal drop-jumps entail dropping from a height and jumping

immediately one contacts the hard surface one lands on - simulating

the impact with a hard surface experienced by people playing squash

on a concrete court surface.

As with all new exercises one should start very gradually and watch

for any symptoms at the time or the morning after. Perhaps dropping

from a mere twelve inches and doing it only three times to start

with. Then, if no symptoms emerge from doing this, perhaps raise the

drop height to eighteen inches, or repetitions to five, and so on.

But my point is that this seems to fit in nicely with your vibration

therapy suggestion. And yes CRON people will tend to have smaller

bones because the body recognizes that stronger bones are not needed

to support much reduced weight ...... in exactly the same way most

astronauts lose bone mass after even relatively short periods in

orbit because their body thinks such strong bones are no longer

required. However, it is not clear whether the bone loss is a

reflection of smaller bone size of greater bone porosity. DXA, which

is usually used to measure this, cannot differentiate and assumes all

variations in bone mass result from an increase in porosity.

Rodney.

>

> I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I just came

across it, and thought it might

> be relevant, since some people on CR have low BMD (bone mineral

density).

>

> The results of one major study on vibration therapy ( " Prevention of

Postmenopausal Bone

> Loss by a Low-Magnitude, High-Frequency Mechanical Stimuli: A

Clinical Trial Assessing

> Compliance, Efficacy, and Safety " ) can be found here

> http://www.bme.sunysb.edu/bme/people/faculty/docs/crubin/2004-JBMR-

recker.pdf

> Although the overall results were disappointing (there was no

average increase in BMD for the

> group getting vibration therapy), there was still lots of good news

from this study, with the

> best results obtained by those women with the highest compliance

(two 10-minute sessions

> per day, just standing on the platform). In that high-compliance

group, there was an average

> increase of BMD of 2.73%; for the women who weighed less than 143

lbs, there was an

> increase of BMD of 3.35%. So a person with low body weight seems

most likely to benefit

> from vibration therapy in order to reverse BMD loss.

>

> And with lower cost WBV (whole body vibration) machines now coming

on the market (e.g.,

> Soloflex), perhaps vibration therapy should be considered by anyone

on CR.

>

> --Bruce

>