Spinal manipulation frequency and dosage effects on clinical and physiological outcomes: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The burden of musculoskeletal disorders increases every year, with low back and neck pain being the most frequently reported conditions for seeking manual therapy treatment. In recent years, manual therapy research has begun exploring the dose-response relationship between spinal manipulation treatment characteristics and both clinical and physiological response to treatment. Objective: The purpose of this scoping review was to identify and appraise the current state of scientific knowledge regarding the effects of spinal manipulation frequency and dosage on both clinical and physiological responses. Methods: A scoping review was conducted to identify all available studies pertaining to our research question. Retrieved papers were screened using a 2-phase method, a selective sorting with titles and abstracts. Potentially relevant studies were read, and data was extracted for all included studies. Randomized control trials were assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool for quality assessment. Results: The search yielded 4854 publications from which 32 were included for analysis. Results were sorted by dosage or frequency outcomes, and divided into human or animal studies. Animal studies mainly focused on dosage and evaluated physiological outcomes only. Studies investigating spinal manipulation dosage effects involved both human and animal research, and showed that varying thrust forces, or thrust durations can impact vertebral displacement, muscular response amplitude or muscle spindle activity. Risk of bias analysis indicated only two clinical trials assessing frequency effects presented a low risk of bias. Although trends in improvement were observed and indicated that increasing the number of SM visits in a short period of time (few weeks) decreased pain and improve disability, the differences between the studied treatment frequencies, were often not statistically significant and therefore not clinically meaningful. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that SM dosage and frequency effects have been mostly studied over the past two decades. Definitions for these two concepts however differ across studies. Overall, the results showed that treatment frequency does not significantly affect clinical outcomes during and following a SM treatment period. Dosage effects clearly influence short-term physiological responses to SM treatment, but relationships between these responses and clinical outcomes remains to be investigated.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.083 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".