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Science & Technology
thursday, february 10, 2011
www.thegatewayonline.ca
Photo illustration: paul swanson
Research shows perception of chronic back pain can affect recovery time Sara Kotow News Writer
Results from a study by University of Alberta researchers have shown that people who believe they have chronic back pain are more likely to have a longer recovery time. Two researchers from the Faculty of Rehabilitation, Doug Gross and Michele Crites-Battie, looked at injured employees going into a rehabilitation centre run by the Workers Compensation Board. They found that those who suffered from back pain were most likely to have negative expectations on their rate of recovery, in part because they believed that the back pain was chronic. The injury groups they studied were back pain, strains and sprains, fractures, dislocations, amputations, and repetitive strain. “Back pain makes up the biggest category of injured workers, making it the most problematic and expensive
group,” Gross said. “Expectations were worse for people with back pain than any of the other groups. People were less positive about back pain then they were about amputations. That tells us something.” Gross explained that back pain is something many people don’t ever think will get better because they don’t understand what causes it or how they can get rid of it. “People go to a doctor thinking they will get a pill that will take their pain away and that they will be cured,” Gross said. “They view chronic back pain as a really nasty condition that you don’t want to get and should be afraid of.” “What needs to change is people thinking of back pain as a disabling condition that’s going to last for the rest of their life. They think something inside of them is broken, or degenerating, when really that’s not it.” He said that if people think they are never going to get better, that is going
to affect their expectations of recovery. “That’s where people’s expectations and what they believe about their pain comes into play. If they think their spine is degrading and they’re never going to get better, they’re going to be less likely to do the things that will help them get better,” he said. Gross said that the old cure for back pain — bed rest — is actually the worst thing to do. The best way to improve is to stay as active as possible and keep up normal activities. Most causes of back pain are nonspecific, with only 10 to 15 per cent of cases having an identifiable cause. “Compression fracture, a bulging disk pinching a nerve — those we can diagnose. Most of the time we can’t narrow it down to a specific tissue, but we do know it will go away,” Gross said. “Just about everyone gets back pain and most of the time it goes away within a couple weeks.” “We can’t cure back pain, but we can change what people think about it.”
Antarctic expedition unearths rare fossils Hayley Dunning News Staff
An expedition to Antarctica has finally unearthed a unique dinosaur species, that though first discovered more than 20 years ago, remained buried until now. University of Alberta paleontologist Phil Currie has just returned from the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, straddling the Antarctic Circle, where he says the creature, a unique meat-eating dinosaur Cryolophosaurus, lived for half the year in total darkness. The skeleton is the highest dinosaur specimen in the world; the altitude and the cold made for a tough expedition. “We were camped on a glacier, high up in the mountains [at] about 2,000 metres above sea level. The valley we were working in was 4,000 metres above sea level, and the upshot of this is we had to use a helicopter to get up and down. We had to go through training courses [and] for the first couple of days, we had to take these pills that help your blood assimilate
oxygen better,” Currie said. The skeleton of the unique meateating dinosaur Cryolophosaurus was first discovered in 1990, but only a third of it could be recovered before funding dried up. The hard rocks of Mount Kirkpatrick make excavation a costly business, and it wasn’t until this winter that the rest of the skeleton was finally removed. While the specimen is the first to be named from Antarctica, the site at Mount Kirkpatrick hints at a richness of new species. “In the process of excavating the specimen we found another one underneath, [and] 30 or 40 metres away we found another dinosaur. One was probably a long-necked dinosaur, a diplodocus type, but it’s a very primitive version of them. The other one is a smaller version of a duck-billed dinosaur like we would find here in Alberta,” Currie said. The Cryolophosaurus was a smaller carnivore similar to the T. Rex, but with a crest running across the skull rather than front-to-back as in all other species with a crest. According
to Currie, the crest was most likely used in attracting a mate. “We know dinosaurs [were] very visual animals. They rely very heavily on frills, horns, and crests. Birds came directly from dinosaurs, and birds use colour heavily, so presumably dinosaurs not only had all these weird frills and things, but they also had colours.” Currie believes that the relation between birds and dinosaurs supports the recent conclusion by a group of paleontologists, including U of A researcher Larry Heaman, that all dinosaurs didn’t die out in one major meteorite strike. “We know that there’s very ancient animals still alive today. You end up with these small little pockets where certain things survive. Well, why not dinosaurs? Why should they have been universally crushed? Dinosaurs are still very dominant — in a way they are more dominant than we are — and that’s because birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. In a way, dinosaurs did not die out at all and they still are very successful.”