Posture and Cognitive Decline

 There was a book I picked up in 2011 or so as I was digging even deeper into how important YOUR posture was. The book is called "The Downside of Upright Posture". It takes a detailed view into how important your posture is and how devastating it can be if we are not aligned correctly. 

We take digital posture pictures in our office on every new patient, and on a regular basis after that as I 1. want to see, and have you see, just what your posture looks like, and 2. how it has improved, or not. Your posture is one of the key stones of Empire Longevity in that if you are not built best, you can not function best. 

Let's take the importance of your posture into even higher importance. Is there a correlation between your posture, mainly from the side seeing if your ear lines up with your a/c joint, that lines up with your lateral hip bone, with a spot just behind your knee, that lines up with the ankle. You should be able to drop a line and have all of those line up. That line has been crooked for years and has gotten progressively worse. The forward head posture that has accelerated from the non use of computers and hand held devices has not only come with the price tag of neck and upper back muscle stress and strain, not only increasing the opportunity for headaches, then leading to your lowback having to work extra hard to counter balance the weight of your head, and other pains added to those. Now we are looking at the correlation of that same forward head posture to cognitive decline. 

From the article "Detection of cognitive decline by spinal posture assessment in health exams of the general older population", (link here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12605-7?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1v_23VtVCUuVI_cJ2qQ67SdfN-jY4hnprV-ogGOtVYpbEt7aoWPTxNowI_aem_cpUSyu_t62CmxieAnB0mOQ) we see the statement "...spinal balance anteriorization can be regarded as an easily visible indicator of latent cognitive decline in community-dwelling older people." 

Also, "We observed that cognitive decline could be reliably detected by combining age and the degree of spinal imbalance". 

In contrast to common thinking that your age alone is the determinant cause of your mental capabilities, this article shows that your head position can have a dramatic influence, and maybe even cause, of mental decline. 

So, what to do? First, get measured. See just how far forward your posture is. This can be done by digital posture pictures, and don't have to be costly. Secondly, find a practitioner that can help you to reduce the forward head, or at least to stop the progression. 

Gravity has a nasty way of making the small forward head posture into a larger posture. 

Get pictures of you. And then take action on it. For your sake.