Fashion Scare
Women — and men — beware! Skinny jeans may be hazardous to your health
Are you a fan of Spanx or skinny jeans? It turns out that wearing them might actually do more harm to your health than good to your figure.
"When you're wearing skinny jeans to make yourself skinny, that's not the point," Dr. Nicholas Morrissey, vascular surgeon with Columbia University Medical Center, told CBS Interactive. "Skinny jeans are meant to accentuate the way you look, not to make yourself look another way.
"Clothing isn't designed to give us a shape that we don't have, and that's where people get in trouble."
A common complaint among wearers of super-tight clothing is a numbing sensation down their thighs. Known as meralgia paresthetica, this numbness is due to the highly constrictive nature of certain clothing items such as Spanx and skinny jeans.
Although the condition alone isn't harmful to your health, Morrissey said that repeated episodes can lead to permanent nerve damage.
Dr. John Michael Li, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, told CBS Miami that some people experience "tight pants syndrome." Symptoms include abdominal discomfort, heartburn and belching from wearing extremely tight pants — typically three inches too small for the individual's waist.
And women aren't the only ones who should worry about wearing too-tight pants. Morrissey indicated that wearing skinny jeans can cause a testicular torsion in men, where a testicle becomes twisted on itself. An untreated torsion could lead to a loss of blood circulation and can even cause the testicle to die.
Although cases of testicular torsion have been reported as a result of tight clothing, none has severe enough that a man has lost a testicle. Typically the condition is very painful and individuals seek help almost immediately, Morrissey said.
So if you're a fan of super-tight clothing, you might want to do yourself — and your health — a favor and go up a size or two. We won't tell.
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