We got some bad news for you hipsters: Wearing skinny jeans can be bad for your health!
Scientists documented this case of a 35-year old Australian woman whose legs were that much swollen it caused her ankles to become so weak that she couldn’t even walk. When she got to the hospital, the doctors had to cut off her pants just to remove them from her legs.
What Was Her Diagnosis?
Compartment syndrome, a condition caused by increased pressure in a confined body space, like, from wearing extra skinny jeans.
The study titled Fashion victim: rhabdomyolysis and bilateral peroneal and tibial neuropathies as a result of squatting in ‘skinny jeans,'” was published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry on June 22.
While the woman was in the hospital, she explained the doctors that she spent the whole day in a pair of extremely tight pants. Doctors found muscle and nerve damage in her legs during her medical exam. The injury made her unable to walk for days.
“I would certainly say, be cautious about wearing skinny jeans when doing this sort of activity,” explains the study co-author Thomas Kimber who treated the woman.
The woman also explained that by the end of her day she noticed that her feet began to numb and had trouble lifting them. A couple of hours later, she collapsed and spent hours lying on the street before she was able to call a taxi to take her to the nearest hospital.
When Dr. Kimber examined the woman, he found that her legs were so extremely swollen that the staff had to cut her jeans off. The doctor also explained that the patient was weak in her calves and had problems moving her feet.
The medical tests showed abnormally high levels of creatine kinase, an enzyme that can cause muscle damage. The patient’s CT scan showed low muscle mass which is a sign of muscle damage. The tests also showed that the patient has bad function of the 2 main nerves in her calf. Luckily, the patient has made a full recovery.
Could This Happen To You?
This type of injury is caused by compression of the nerves near the top of the calf bones.
In this particular woman’s case, wearing skinny jeans probably made this problem worse by building up pressure in her legs.
“If she’d been wearing loose, flowing trousers, the muscles could have swelled outward. But in the skinny jeans, her swollen muscles “had nowhere to go, except down onto the nerves and the blood vessels,” explained Dr. Kimber.
There have been many reports in which tight pants have compressed nerves in the groins and caused numbness. This is the first report that wearing tight jeans caused nerve and muscle damage.