FRIDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) -- In patients with low back pain, a clinical prediction rule may be generalizable to additional thrust manipulation techniques but not to non-thrust manipulation techniques, according to a study in the Dec. 1 issue of Spine.
Joshua A. Cleland, P.T., of Franklin Pierce University in Concord, N.H., and colleagues randomly assigned 112 patients to receive two sessions of one of three manual therapy techniques and an additional three sessions of an exercise regimen. At baseline, one week, four weeks and six months, the patients completed self-report questionnaires including the Oswestry Disability Questionnaire (ODQ) and the Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NPRS).
At one week and four weeks, the researchers observed significant differences between the thrust manipulation and the non-thrust manipulation groups in the ODQ and NPRS. At six months, they found that the thrust groups had significantly higher ODQ scores.
"The results of the study support the generalizability of the clinical prediction rule to another thrust manipulation technique, but not to the non-thrust manipulation technique that was used in this study. In general, our results also provided support that the clinical prediction rule can be generalized to different settings from which it was derived and validated," the authors conclude. "However, additional research is needed to examine this issue."
