Neck Injuries And Blood Pressure
There was a lot of publicity a few weeks ago about research which showed a link between neck injuries and a rise in BP. Manipulation from chiropractors and others seemed to help. I emailed the researcher, Prof Jim Deuchars and received this reply, which may be relevant to members who had neck injuries. I wonder if any of you noticed a link with your BP???
Subject: Neck muscles and blood pressure age-----
From: Jim Deuchars [mailto:J.Deuchars@leeds.ac.uk]
Sent: 23 August 2007 17:24
Dear all,
I am writing to thank you for your interest in our recent article published in the Journal of Neuroscience. My apologies for the delay in replying but I have been away on holiday and have been dealing with an urgent task since my return last week.
I would first like to point out that I am not a clinician and unfortunately cannot offer clinical advice. I am also sorry not to reply to you all individually, but I hope that this answers many of the questions raised.
Another point to make is that some of the media coverage has exaggerated our findings significantly!
So what did we show? We found that a part of the brain that receives signals from neck muscles (the exact muscles are not all known yet, but the sub-occipital group seem to be involved) when they are stretched can talk to cells in another part of the brain that is well known for blood pressure control. This is a fairly novel finding but it is too early to be sure what these connections do. We proposed some ideas in the paper and we hope to be able to test them in the future, should funding permit it. What you heard in the media was likely to be an extrapolation of these ideas!
Several of you wrote to myself and my colleagues indicating that injuries to the neck (often whiplash) seemed to be associated with sudden increases in your blood pressure. I have found these cases very interesting and will keep them in mind when we continue our work and when thinking about future avenues. Several noted that they were told it was ‘not possible’ that the neck injury could influence blood pressure. I suggest that our work shows that it may well be possible. However, more work is needed for the hard scientific proof.
We cited work by chiropractors where they reported changes in blood pressure following manipulation of the cervical vertebra (neck region). For your information I enclose summaries of these papers. Please note that we do not have evidence that neck massage influences blood pressure, as reported in several places, but in fact I enclose below the summary of two papers which suggest that this is indeed possible. Whether such changes can be long term I suspect remains to be established.
I look forward to further experiments in which we hope to answer some of the questions you have raised.
Some of you have raised similar issues and if you think it would be of benefit to be put in touch with others who contacted me then let me know and I shall send an email list.
regards
Jim
Jim Deuchars
Professor of Systems Neuroscience
Institute of Membrane and Systems Biology
Garstang Building
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT
http://www.fbs.leeds.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?staff=JDeu