Association of lumbar spine stiffness and flexion-relaxation phenomenon with patient-reported outcomes in adults with chronic low back pain – a single-arm clinical trial investigating the effects of thrust spinal manipulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Spinal manipulation (SM) is used commonly for treating low back pain (LBP). Spinal stiffness is routinely assessed by clinicians performing SM. Flexion-relaxation ratio (FRR) was shown to distinguish between LBP and healthy populations. The primary objective of this study was to examine the association of these two physiological variables with patient-reported pain intensity and disability in adults with chronic LBP (>12 weeks) receiving SM. METHODS: A single-arm trial provided 12 sessions of side-lying thrust SM in the lumbosacral region over 6 weeks. Inclusion criteria included 21-65 years old, Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ) score ≥ 6 and numerical pain rating score ≥ 2. Spinal stiffness and FRR were assessed pre-treatment at baseline, after 2 weeks and after 6 weeks of treatment. Lumbar spine global stiffness (GS) were calculated from the force-displacement curves obtained using i) hand palpation, ii) a hand-held device, and iii) an automated indenter device. Lumbar FRR was assessed during trunk flexion-extension using surface electromyography. The primary outcomes were RMDQ and pain intensity measured by visual analog scale (VAS). Mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze the data. RESULTS: The mean age of the 82 participants was 45 years; 48% were female; and 84% reported LBP >1 year. The mean (standard deviation) baseline pain intensity and RMDQ were 46.1 (18.1) and 9.5 (4.3), respectively. The mean reduction (95% confidence interval) after 6 weeks in pain intensity and RMDQ were 20.1 mm (14.1 to 26.1) and 4.8 (3.7 to 5.8). There was a small change over time in the palpatory GS but not in the hand-held or automated GS, nor in FRR. The addition of each physiologic variable did not affect the model-estimated changes in VAS or RMDQ over time. There was no association seen between physiological variables and LBP intensity. Higher levels of hand-held GS at L3 and automated GS were significantly associated with higher levels of RMDQ (p = 0.02 and 0.03, respectively) and lower levels of flexion and extension FRR were significantly associated with higher levels of RMDQ (p = 0.02 and 0.008, respectively) across the 3 assessment time points. CONCLUSIONS: Improvement in pain and disability observed in study participants with chronic LBP was not associated with the measured GS or FRR. TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT01670292 on clinicaltrials.gov, August 2, 2012.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".