Wearing a Tie Could Mess With The Blood Supply to Your Brain

The things we do for fashion.

The act of tightening a tie can be seen as a sign of getting down to business, or inferring superiority, or putting your best foot forward – but it might also be restricting the blood flow to the brain, according to a new study.

By compressing the veins in the neck, tie-wearers could be pushing blood into the skull and creating an unhealthy build-up of pressure.

The difference isn't enough to be a serious health risk to most people, the researchers from University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Germany say – but it might cause problems for groups that are already at risk from blood pressure issues, like smokers or the elderly.

Previous studies have already linked tight ties with an increase in pressure on the eyes, and a possible association with glaucoma risk as a result.

"Based on these [previous] results, the aim of this study was to further investigate the effect of how wearing a necktie can negatively affect cerebral blood flow (CBF) and jugular venous flow," write the researchers.

Using MRI scans, the team analysed 15 male volunteers who were wearing neckties tightened to a "point of slight discomfort", and 15 male volunteers who weren't wearing neckties at all.

Cerebral blood flow, the blood supply to the brain, was found to drop by an average of 7.5 percent in the men wearing a necktie, with no drop reported in the control group. The difference is likely to be caused by the extra pressure from the tie crushing blood vessels, the researchers say.

Meanwhile venous blood flow around the rest of the body wasn't affected in either of the two groups.

Blood flow to the brain is vital to its proper functioning, as you can imagine. It gives brain cells access to the oxygen, glucose, and nutrients needed to do its job, and if the supply dries up, that can cause temporary blips or, in severe cases, permanent damage.

However, Steve Kassem from Neuroscience Research Australia, who wasn't involved in the study, told Alice Klein at New Scientist that a 7.5 percent drop is unlikely to cause noticeable symptoms.

That said, people who already problems with blood flow – smokers, the elderly, those with high blood pressure, for example – might be more at risk, Kassem says. Headaches, dizziness, and nausea might be brought on.

Even though the drop noticed in this small sample isn't too damaging, it's one excuse to get your boss to go along with dress-down Fridays – or to maybe loosen your tie at little at the next wedding you go to.

As always though, it's important to get context. Take for example the 2015 study that found that wearing a suit could make the wearer feel more powerful and see the bigger picture. Maybe that's worth a little reduction in blood flow.

Based on the results of the study, the team wants to expand the research to cover those at-risk groups, to see whether wearing a necktie or not could have significant impacts on health. For those in an office job, a tie might be expected for eight hours of each day.

For now though, the majority of us can carry on tightening or loosening our ties as we prefer. The researchers conclude by pointing out that most patients don't expect their doctors to wear a tie – so that's one profession that's off the hook.

The research has been published in Neuroradiology.

Team Work - Meaning and Tips for better Team Work

A single brain is not always capable of making key decisions on its own. To come up with an efficient solution, an individual requires the help and advice of others. A team is established when individuals get together on a common platform with the common goal of completing a task. To guarantee optimum compatibility, team members should ideally come from similar backgrounds and have a single aim. To provide their best, the team members must complement each other and function as a single unit in tight cooperation. "There is no I in Team Work," as the saying goes, and each member must put the needs of his team first. Personal interests must take a second seat. Any team's performance is directly proportionate to the relationship between its members and their combined efforts. What is the definition of teamwork? Teamwork is defined as the sum of each team member's efforts toward the fulfilment of the team's goal. In other words, any team's backbone is its ability t

Scientists discover a new theory / The fundamental property of light – 150 years after Maxwell

Light plays a vital role in our everyday lives and technologies based on light are all around us. So we might expect that our understanding of light is pretty settled. But scientists have just uncovered a new fundamental property of light that gives new insight into the 150-year-old classical theory of electromagnetism and which could lead to applications manipulating light at the nanoscale. It is unusual for a pure-theory physics paper to make it into the journal Science. So when one does, it’s worth a closer look. In the new study, researchers bring together one of physics' most venerable set of equations – those of James Clerk’s Maxwell’s famous theory of light – with one of the hot topics in modern solid-state physics: the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators . To understand what the fuss is about, let’s first consider the behaviour of electrons in the quantum spin Hall effect. Electrons possess an intrinsic spin as if they were tiny spinning-tops,

19 Types Of Content Writing Services For Your Business

It’s hard to know which type of content writing service is the best for your business. There are so many different types of content writing services out there that it’s easy to get confused. You end up wondering if you’re choosing the right one for you. In this post, we’ll get rid of this confusion, once and for all. I’m going to list out the different kinds of writing services you could use. By the end of this article, you’ll know whether you need a copywriter, a content writer, or a social media marketer and how they can help you achieve your business goals. This post is also useful for writers who want to hone their writing skills in a specific area. Let’s dive in and learn what types of content writing services exist and when you should use them. (Bonus – if you want to hire the top 1% of writers, go to the bottom to learn how). Types of Content Writing Services As we go through the list of content writing services, you will find that many of them overlap. That’s perfectly

The LimitlessX - Get Tech Science News around the Globe

Search This Blog