Abstract
ABSTRACTIn humans, compressive stress on intervertebral discs is commonly deployed as a measurand for assessing the loads that act within the spine. Examining this physical quantity is crucially beneficial: the intradiscal pressure can be directly measured in vivo in humans, and is immediately related to compressive stress. Hence, measured intradiscal pressure data are very useful for validating such biomechanical animal models that have the spine incorporated, and can, thus, compute compressive stress values. Here, we use human intradiscal pressure data to verify the predictions of a reductionist spine model, which has in fact only one joint degree of freedom. We calculate the pulling force of one lumped anatomical structure that acts past this (intervertebral) joint at the base of the spine, lumbar in hominins, cervical in giraffes, to compensate the torque that is induced by the weight of all masses located cranially to the base. Given morphometric estimates of the human and australopith trunks, respectively, and the giraffe's neck, as well as the respective structures’ lever arms and disc areas, we predict, for all three species, the compressive stress on the intervertebral disc at the spine base, while systematically varying the angular orientation of the species’ spinal columns with respect to gravity. The comparison between these species demonstrates that hominin everyday compressive disc stresses are lower than those in big quadrupedal animals. Within each species, erecting the spine from being bent forward by, for example, thirty degrees to fully upright posture reduces the compressive disc stress roughly to a third. We conclude that erecting the spine immediately allows the carrying of extra loads of the order of body weight, and yet the compressive disc stress is lower than in a moderately forward-bent posture with no extra load.
Highlights
In the extant animal kingdom, a permanently upright posture of the whole spinal column is a rare exception, namely, performed solely by Homo sapiens
As can be seen in Fig. 3, the compressive stress values predicted by our model for the human L4/L5 intervertebral disc (IVD) ranges from 0.34 MPa in fully erect posture (φ=90°) to a maximum of 1.85 MPa at about φ=10°, i.e., forward bending of the HAT by 80° from upright posture
At the point of maximum compressive stress, φ=10°, we would predict an intradiscal pressure of 2.58 MPa
Summary
In the extant animal kingdom, a permanently upright (fully erect) posture of the whole spinal column is a rare exception, namely, performed solely by Homo sapiens. To predict values of compressive stress (external pressure) on the IVD at the giraffe’s cervical spine level C7/T1, depth and width values of the endplates were taken from van Sittert et al (2010, Fig. 2C,D) (Table 1), and used to calculate the endplate areas assuming that half of the depth and width, respectively, represent the half-axes of an ellipse. The CoM position (assuming homogeneous mass density) is (see, e.g. Stöcker, 2008)
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