Can your computer kill you? Well, it can. Especially if it lands on your head
from a great height. However, sorry about the attention grabbing headline, it’s
an old journalist’s trick. Your computer really won’t kill you (other than the
situation mentioned above), but sitting at your computer, for hours on end, can!
And backing up this contentious claim is one of the world’s respected medical
publications, the New Zealand Medical Journal, with the results tabled at
an annual conference of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.
Now everyone in the world, other than a few farmers in outer
Mongolia who still use horses like Genghis Kahn, has heard of the “Economy Class
Syndrome”, in which you end up getting blood clots in the legs from being
squeezed into seat 176A at the rear of the Economy section of Fright or Flight
airlines. The rationale is that after sitting in 176A for the 12 hour flight to
bring the bad news to Outer Mongolia about Genghis’ passing, the blood flow in
the legs slows so much that clotting forms and you end up with yet another
medical acronym, this time called DVT, or more correctly Deep Vein Thrombosis,
or even Deep Venous Thrombosis. This knowledge has produced a group of nervous
airline passengers, cowering in fear, waiting for hijacking or DVTs.
However, Professor Richard Beasley of the Medical Research
Institute in New Zealand has studied the folk admitted to hospital with DVTs and
found that only 21 percent had traveled on long distance flights, whilst 34
percent were sedentary office workers who would sit in front of their computer
screen for three to four hours at a stretch without getting up, and do this for
up to 14 hours a day. This showed two factors. Firstly their work habit was
dangerous, allowing the blood to pool up in their legs, and secondly, they had
magnificent bladder control, much better than mine.
Whilst I was joking about the bladder control, I would
postulate that to be able to sit for four hours at a time, these office workers
were not drinking enough fluid, leading to hemoconcentration or thickening of
the blood, and even more likelihood of blood clots. Look around your office, how
many of the staff have a water jug, or even a glass of water on their work
station? In my office, only two of us have water on the desk.
That’s enough on the factors leading to DVT, what can a DVT
do? What happens is very understandable. The clot breaks off from the deep vein
and then travels upwards towards the heart. In doing so, it will go from major,
large diameter blood vessels into smaller and smaller again. Eventually,
depending upon the size, the clot will become wedged in a very small vessel and
shut off the blood supply to that area.
If the blockage occurs in the lung, the condition is called a
Pulmonary Embolism (PE). This is potentially fatal. It is estimated that each
year more than 600,000 patients suffer a pulmonary embolism. PE causes or
contributes to up to 200,000 deaths annually in the United States. One in every
100 patients who develop DVT die due to pulmonary embolism. So you don’t want
one, do you.
There is some good news in all this, if pulmonary embolism
can be diagnosed early and appropriate therapy started early, the mortality can
be reduced from approximately 30 percent to less than 10 percent.
Still, 10 percent is a little too high for my liking. So what
can you do to prevent getting a DVT in the first place? Apart from the obvious
maintenance of good health with sensible eating and drinking and regular
check-ups, the important preventive factors include getting up and walking
around at least every hour (both in the office and from seat 176A), drinking
plenty of water and taking 100 mg of aspirin every day. By making it less likely
that a clot can form, you remove the dangers of DVT.
Go and get a glass of water now! And use it to swallow your
aspirin.
