Adverse Events Associated With Pediatric Spinal Manipulation: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Spinal manipulation is a noninvasive manual procedure applied to specific body tissues with therapeutic intent. Although spinal manipulation is commonly used in children, there is limited understanding of the pediatric risk estimates. OBJECTIVE: Our goal was to systematically identify and synthesize available data on adverse events associated with pediatric spinal manipulation. METHODS: A comprehensive search was performed of 8 major electronic databases (eg, Medline, AMED, MANTIS) from inception to June 2004 irrespective of language. Reports were included if they (1) were a primary investigation of spinal manipulation (eg, observation studies, controlled trials, surveys), (2) included a study population of children who were aged 18 years or younger, and (3) reported data on adverse events. Data were summarized to demonstrate the nature and severity of adverse events that may result rather than their incidence. RESULTS: Thirteen studies (2 randomized trials, 11 observational reports) were identified for inclusion. We identified 14 cases of direct adverse events involving neurologic or musculoskeletal events. Nine cases involved serious adverse events (eg, subarachnoidal hemorrhage, paraplegia), 2 involved moderately adverse events that required medical attention (eg, severe headache), and 3 involved minor adverse events (eg, midback soreness). Another 20 cases of indirect adverse events involved delayed diagnosis (eg, diabetes, neuroblastoma) and/or inappropriate provision of spinal manipulation for serious medical conditions (ie, meningitis, rhabdomyosarcoma). CONCLUSIONS: Serious adverse events may be associated with pediatric spinal manipulation; neither causation nor incidence rates can be inferred from observational data. Conduct of a prospective population-based active surveillance study is required to properly assess the possibility of rare, yet serious, adverse events as a result of spinal manipulation on pediatric patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".