Joe Tatta DPT, CCN, Musculoskeletal Pain Expert, was interviewed by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
Nutritional Influences on Anxiety and Musculoskeletal Pain
- Link between anxiety and chronic musculoskeletal problems
- Fear avoidance behaviors and pain
- Headaches, back pain, joint pain and nutritional influences
- An exercise prescription for anxiety
Here are some snippets from our interview:
People used to think depression was more linked to chronic pain but we are learning its more anxiety driven
The chronic anxiety that people have on a daily basis kicks off the pain process
Negative thoughts, worry, doom-and-gloom about the future all come in to play, with fear being the most common emotion leading to pain
Here is the very recent 2015 paper that discusses this – Psychological functioning of people living with chronic pain: A meta-analytic review.
Joe tied fear and anxiety to adrenalin release and the effects on the muscles, specifically how the smaller muscles around the spine and in the neck are turned off. You then have less blood flow, less oxygen and less nutrients going to those muscles and that’s when the pain starts.
Joe shared the staggering number of people who suffer from chronic pain:
more than those who suffer from heart disease, diabetes and cancer combined!
We also discussed migraines and magnesium, and this paper: Why all migraine patients should be treated with magnesium
Magnesium, the second most abundant intracellular cation, is essential in many intracellular processes and appears to play an important role in migraine pathogenesis. Routine blood tests do not reflect true body magnesium stores since <2% is in the measurable, extracellular space, 67% is in the bone and 31% is located intracellularly. Lack of magnesium may promote cortical spreading depression, hyperaggregation of platelets, affect serotonin receptor function, and influence synthesis and release of a variety of neurotransmitters.
There is strong evidence that magnesium deficiency is much more prevalent in migraine sufferers than in healthy controls.
Considering these features of magnesium, the fact that magnesium deficiency may be present in up to half of migraine patients, and that routine blood tests are not indicative of magnesium status, empiric treatment with at least oral magnesium is warranted in all migraine sufferers.
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