(Lifestyle) Experts ask to be careful with very heavy school bags

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Excess weight can cause spinal problems, such as: scoliosis and disc damage (herniated).

Providing children with all the necessary implements for their return to school is one of the main objectives of parents, who carry out important work to guarantee their children a school period with optimal conditions.

With the entrance to classes, there are many details that must be paid special attention to, and one of them is the type of backpack and the weight that each student carries.

Experts from the University of Medical Sciences, UCIMED, call on parents to evaluate the weight of the implements that their children are carrying in their packages, since the overload to which students are often exposed , could affect the skeleton that is growing.

“A lateral deviation of the spine (scoliosis) or an increase in the upper [CENSORED]ture (hyperkyphosis) and even disc involvement that could become herniated during adult life, are some of the problems that can occur when a child is exposed to a lot of load. For this reason, the world recommendation is that the weight of the backpack should not exceed 10% of the student's body weight”, explains Giovani Garita Meneses, director of the Physiotherapy program at UCIMED.

Prestigious organizations that ensure the safety of children in this area, such as: Backpack Safety America, Backpack Safety Tips and the American Physical Therapy Association, point out that the child's body weight must be taken into account to define the weight of the load. Thus, the recommendation is as follows:

A child weighing 30 kilos should not carry more than 3 kg
For a 40 kilo child, the maximum load is 4 kg
A child of 50 kilos, must carry only 5 kg

“It is urgent to pay more attention to this issue and begin to lighten the load of the backpacks that children carry. We must bear in mind that it is a growing body, which requires greater care. Recently, a study was carried out in Argentina in which it was found that, of the 751 students surveyed, 68% used backpacks that exceeded the average of 10% of their body weight. Although we do not have data from our country, we know that this reality is not far away”, says the UCIMED expert.

In addition to the weight of the backpack, Garita warns that the use of packages with a single strap is not recommended, since they distribute the load asymmetrically, causing the vertebral discs to load unevenly and promoting the appearance of hernias during adulthood.

Likewise, the expert asks to pay attention to the straps of the packages, which must be padded, extendable to regulate the height, with a minimum thickness of 5 cm and have a waist belt, to prevent the backpack from moving when walking and hit the waist

And the packages with wheels? In this case, the UCIMED Physiotherapist recommends that the wheels be large and suggests that this type of backpack "is better to push it and not pull it, since if the wheels stick somewhere, this could cause serious injuries to the shoulder and elbow ”.
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