Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Skinny jeans, the snug-fitting type of denim pants that have gained popularity in recent years, could actually be harmful to your health, experts from the University of Adelaide in Australia report in research published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
Thomas Edmund Kimber, a member of the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s neurology unit and an associate professor in the University of Adelaide’s Department of Medicine, and his colleagues report on a case study involving a 35-year-old female patient at the medical facility who said she had been experiencing severe weakness in both of her ankles.
The woman told doctors that she had been helping a relative move the previous day, and spent several hours squatting to empty cupboards while wearing tight-fitting skinny jeans. She recalled that the jeans began feeling increasingly tight and uncomfortable as the day progressed. By the evening, she said her feet had grown numb and it had become difficult to walk.
As a result, the woman tripped and fell, and was unable to get up. She spent several hours on the ground before being found, and her calves had become so swollen that her pants had to be cut off her. She was unable to move her ankles or toes properly, and had lost all feeling in her lower legs and her feet.
Some pants advice
An examination found that the patient had damaged muscle and nerve fibers in her lower legs as a result of prolonged compression while squatting – a condition the doctors believe was probably made worse due to the tight jeans she was wearing, Kimber told redOrbit via email.
“I believe that the combination of squatting and tight jeans caused the problem,” he explained. “Prolonged squatting would have compressed the peroneal nerves in the lower leg and reduced the blood supply to the calf muscles. The tight jeans meant that, as the calf muscles started to swell in response to the reduced blood supply, they compressed the adjacent tibial nerves.”
As these nerves were compressed, they would have “further cut off the blood supply” to the patient’s muscles, Kimber added. This reduction in blood supply to her legs – a condition known as compartment syndrome – required that the woman be placed on an intravenous drip for four days, after which time she regained the ability to walk and was discharged from the hospital.
“If the woman had been wearing loose trousers, the calf muscles could have swollen ‘outwards’ rather than ‘inwards,’ thus avoiding pressure on the nerves and blood vessels,” he told redOrbit. While Kimber said that the risk of something like this happening is “probably small,” he added that people should “avoid squatting for long periods of time while wearing skinny jeans. If they experience leg discomfort or tingling while squatting, they should stand up and walk around.”
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