OCR Text |
Show CREAKY JOINTS Many Noises Mark Action NEW YORK. When a person's joints start to crack and creak, as they sometimes do, the cracking sounds from fingers, knees or ankles may be heard by people sev-, eral feet away and two causes may be blamed: weather and in-1 fection. ; Human joints, having a faculty of being quite noisy, may crack,; creak, snap, crunch, grate or click1' when they move. This was demon-j strated in a study in which sounds j of the joints were analyzed with special detection instruments. Now, Dr. Edward E. Brown of Portland, Ore., reports a new study of cracking joints. He became in-, terested in why and when they, crack. So for four years he tried to crack the joints of his fingers several sev-eral times each day. He would twist his hands to face palms out,1 thus stretching the joints. His fingers cracked more than! 1,000 times out of several thousand! attempts. Other people helped out! In the study by keeping their own' cracking charts. i Tendency General Apparently there's a tendency in each person for particular joints to crack, Dr. Brown says. Some get it: in the fingers, others the knees,1 ankles or other joints. Children's joints crack, too, so the cracking isn't just a sign of get-! ting old. It may come in all types of arthritis. Dr. Brown found that on days when his fingers cracked some of his other joints were more likely to: crack. ' Other people often noticed more! cracking of their joints on the same! days that he did. Weather and humidity apparently: have a lot to do with the cracking, he said. He found it comes more often In, cold or chilly weather, or even on hot days when your body gets chilled. In warm weather there might be days or weeks with no cracking at all, he said. Climate is Factor Where you live might affect your, joint cracking. Dr. Brown's fingers cracked much more in San Francisco Fran-cisco in July than in Portland, Seattle Seat-tle or New York City in the same month. San Francisco was cooler. He noticed more cracking on days of electrical storms, when the air was heavily ionized or charged. What he ate, how much sleep he' had had, or how tired he was didn't affect the cracking rate, the physician physi-cian said. But having a nasal obstruction ob-struction was usually accompanied by more cracking. Some of his patients pa-tients had severe cracking of joints following various infections. Why do joints crack? Dr. Brown says it may be due to an inflammation inflamma-tion of fibrous tissue. The fibers may shorten, get a little bit stiff and then stretch wih a cracking noise when the joint moves. This inflammation, called fibrosi-tis, fibrosi-tis, might be one of the most common com-mon of human ailments, he adds. In theory, poisons or toxins from certain cer-tain bacteria might produce the inflammation, in-flammation, he writes. And the bacteria bac-teria might be more active when the body is chilled or when the air is ionized. |