The effect of two weeks of spinal manipulative therapy and home stretching exercises on pain and disability in patients with persistent or recurrent neck pain; a randomized controlled trial

Background: Recurrent or persistent neck pain affects a vast number of people globally, leading to reduced quality of life and high societal costs. Clinically, it is a difficult condition to manage, and treatment effect sizes are often moderate at best. Activity and manual therapy are first-line treatment options in current guidelines. We aimed to investigate the combination of home stretching exercises and spinal manipulative therapy in a multicentre randomized controlled clinical trial, carried out in multidiscipline ary primary care clinics.

Methods: The treatment modalities utilized were spinal manipulative therapy and home stretching exercises compared to home stretching exercises alone. Both groups received 4 treatments for 2 weeks. The primary outcome was pain, where the subjective pain experience was investigated by assessing pain intensity (NRS - 11) and the quality of pain (McGill Pain Questionnaire). Neck disability and health status were secondary outcomes, measured using the Neck Disability Indexthe EQ-5D, respectively. One hundred thirty-one adult subjects were randomized to one of the two treatment groups. All subjects had experienced persistent or recurrent neck pain the previous 6 months and were blinded to the other group intervention. The clinicians provided treatment for subjects in both group and could not be blinded. The researchers collecting data were blinded to treatment allocation, as was the statistician performing data analyses. An intention-to-treat analysis was used.

Results: Sixty-six subjects were randomized to the intervention group, and sixty-five to the control group. For NRS - 11, a B-coefficient of - 0,01 was seen, indication a 0,01 improvement for the intervention group in relation to the control group at each time point with a p-value of 0,305. There were no statistically significant differences between groups for any of the outcome measures.

Conclusion: Based on the current findings, there is no additional treatment effect from adding spinal manipulative therapy to neck stretching exercises over 2 weeks for patients with persistent or recurrent neck pain.

Trial registration: The trial was registered 03/07/2018 at ClinicalTrials.gov , registration number: NCT03576846.