The Effect of Abdominal Stabilization Contractions on Posteroanterior Spinal Stiffness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Intrasubject controls with randomized intervention order. OBJECTIVE: To quantify the immediate change in posteroanterior (PA) spinal stiffness produced by different combinations of trunk muscle contraction. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: The abdominal hollow and the abdominal brace are 2 different combinations of trunk muscle contractions that are commonly prescribed to increase spinal stability. Unfortunately, the immediate effect of these different contractions on spinal stiffness (one indicator of spinal stability) has not yet been quantified directly. METHODS: Twenty-eight asymptomatic subjects were taught abdominal hollow and brace contractions then performed them in a randomized order framed by periods of rest. Surface electromyography and B-mode ultrasound confirmed that all contractions were performed appropriately. During each test condition (hollow, brace, and rest), a noninvasive indentation technique was used to quantify PA spinal stiffness. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to assess the significance of changes in the PA spinal stiffness between test conditions. RESULTS: Both the abdominal hollow and abdominal brace contractions increased PA spinal stiffness significantly when compared with the rest condition (P < 0.001). When the abdominal hollow and brace contractions were compared with each other, the abdominal brace contraction produced significantly greater PA spinal stiffness (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: In asymptomatic subjects, the abdominal brace contraction provided an immediate PA stiffening effect that was significantly greater in magnitude when compared with conditions of rest and abdominal hollowing. These findings may allow clinicians to better match commonly prescribed contraction-based interventions with specific patient needs. Future work is required to assess the long-term effect of repeated abdominal brace and hollow contractions on PA spinal stiffness and low back pain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".