Compacted Discs

As you bend, your spine shifts. The older you are, the more likely there’s a little stiffness as the vertebrae, the interlocking chunks of bone, realign. Back pain associated with ageing is commonly caused by deterioration of the discs that sit between the bones, protecting the structures and enabling movement. Researchers keen to understand this breakdown looked at the different composition of discs in old and young people, analysing the presence of two protein types: extracellular matrix proteins, which form the scaffold binding cells together, and signalling proteins, which allow cells to communicate. The study found that both the amount and production of these proteins was greater in younger people. It also developed a new tool to analyse the distribution of these proteins with MRI (pictured, with high water content, indicating the protein makeup, yellow), which could help guide new approaches to protecting the discs, and holding back pain.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Wilson Chan and Vivian Tam
• School of Biomedical Sciences,, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, December 2020