Effects of Self-Assisted Manual Therapy Combined with a High-Intensity Walking Program on Musculoskeletal Pain, Functionality, and Posture in Older Adults: A Multicentre Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Aging is associated with musculoskeletal pain and postural adaptations which may affect functionality. This study aims to analyse the effect of a combined protocol of self-assisted manual therapy and high-intensity walking on musculoskeletal back pain, functionality, and shoulder posture in older adults, and to establish the short- and medium-term effects of this program. Methods: A multicentre, double-blind, randomized trial was conducted on older adults. The sample was divided into two groups: the self-assisted manual therapy plus walking at high-intensity group (MTWG) and the Control Group (CG), with the latter undergoing supervised high-intensity walking only. Pain (Pressure Pain Threshold and Visual Analogue Scale), functional capacity (5-times sit-to-stand test), and change in thorax position (acromion position) were assessed at T0 (baseline), T1 (after 4-week intervention) and T2 (follow-up, 4 weeks after the end of the intervention). Results: A total of 95 older adults (41 in the MTWG and 54 in CG) completed the study and were analyzed. After isolating the effect of correlations among our primary outcomes, our analysis revealed statistically significant between-subject (p < 0.01), within-subject (p < 0.001) and between-within subject differences (p < 0.05) in Pressure Pain Threshold scores in favour of the MTWG. We also detected within-subjects (p < 0.001) and between-within subject differences (p < 0.05) in scores for the Visual Analogue Scale, in favour of the MTWG. These patterns of results remained stable at T2. The 5-times sit-to-stand test (p < 0.01) and the acromion position (p < 0.05) improved at T1 for the MTWG but not at T2. Conclusions: A combined protocol of self-assisted manual therapy and high-intensity walking, compared to high-intensity walking alone, improved musculoskeletal pain, functionality, and posture in older adults in the short term (over one month), with pain reduction maintained in the medium term (at the one-month follow-up).
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 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".