We Get Shorter With Age

Hey, Shorty! How's the weather down there?

Most of us will enter our Golden Years an inch (sometimes more) shorter than our height at, say, 40. Included in this prediction are such notables of altitude as Shaq and Randy Johnson.

The explanation for this decrement has nothing to do with the problem of reading the height scale while wearing bifocals.

Osteoporosis of the spine gets most of the credit for loss of height, and this is appropriate but incomplete information. (Imagine a stack of loaded cardboard boxes in a rain-storm. Their collapse would be similar to that of vertebrae with bone-mineral loss.) Several other forces are at work to produce a vertical challenge.

One very common change is in the thickness of those discs between vertebrae. These English muffin-shaped things are cushions filled with compressible material, much of which is water. With age, the water dries up, and the muffin gets squished down to about half its former thickness. Add up the loss in roughly two dozen muffins, and you have a significant amount, perhaps an inch or two. The good news is that it doesn't hurt when this happens. The bad news is that there is no way to prevent or to treat it.

An odd sort of thing that occurs with maturity is that our hip bones change their shape a bit. Early in life the top of the femur angles in to the hip socket at roughly 45 degrees. With a few years logged on the apparatus, the angle tends to flatten out to more like 60 degrees. This results in another subtraction from overall height. It is more pronounced in women, and is probably related to osteoporosis.

In order to cushion the shocks associated with walking, running, and carrying heavy burdens, the human spine was designed with three curves, in the neck, the upper back and in the lumbar area. Although the degree of curvature can be controlled to some extent by a lifetime of practicing good posture, eventually the curves will increase. The cumulative effect of sharper curves is a saggy spine and a shorter person.

Did any of you ever try those "gravity boot" apparatuses intended to benefit lower back problems? The procedure was intended to relieve pain, and was adopted by many patients and physical therapists. Suspension upside down results in an overall reduction in the curves in the spine, and is preferred over suspension by the neck. (The latter accomplishes roughly the same result, however there may be undesirable side effects.)

One might suppose that if the hang time were long enough, there might be a restoration of some total body height. You could do it on a medieval rack also, but wasn't that supposed to be torture? Hmmm. Come to think of it, there are lots of "treatments" which are thinly disguised torture techniques.

Let's see, two inches off due to water loss from the discs, another inch from the change in hip bone angle, plus a couple caused by curve changes - that adds up to four or five! Just gone! If you have to include some for osteoporosis as well, that formerly statuesque runway model is flat brought down to size.

That's the bad news again. The good news is that some of the height loss is preventable through posture correction and osteoporosis interventions. More good news is that everyone else you know is undergoing the same changes. If you hang out with people your own age, no one will notice that you are shorter than you used to be.