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Bad posture could raise your blood pressure

14:12 11 August 2007 NewScientist.com news service

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THAT office job might be raising your blood pressure in more ways than one.

A link between the muscles in the neck, blood pressure and heart rate has long been suspected. Now Jim Deuchars and colleagues at the University of Leeds, UK, have found a direct neural connection between these neck muscles and a part of the brainstem - called the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) - which plays a crucial role in regulating heart rate and blood pressure.

Deuchars's team was using mice to investigate how the brain responds to a variety of stimulatory and inhibitory proteins. They noticed that a group of brain cells connected to the neck muscles kept firing in response to both types of proteins, suggesting the cells played a very active role in the brain.

"The cells lit up time and time again, so we looked at what they were doing," says team member Ian . It turned out that these cells are also connected to the NTS (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0638-07.2007).

says the finding could explain why blood pressure and heart rate sometimes change when the neck muscles are injured - through whiplash, for example. Similarly, it is possible that hours spent hunched over a computer may raise blood pressure. "The pathway exists for bad posture to really have an effect," says.

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