Abstract
Neck pain is a frequent health problem. Manual therapy (MT) and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) are recommended techniques for treatment of mechanical neck disorders (MND) in Spanish Public Primary Care Physiotherapy Services. The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of MT versus TENS in active mobility and endurance in cervical subacute or chronic neck pain. Ninety patients with MND were randomly allocated to receive ten 30-min sessions of either MT or TENS, in a multi-centered study through 12 Primary Care Physiotherapy Units in the Madrid community. Active cervical range of motion (CD-ROM) and endurance (Palmer and Epler test) were evaluated pre- and post-intervention and at 6-month follow-up. A generalized linear model of repeated measures was constructed for the analysis of differences. Post-intervention MT yielded a significant improvement in active mobility and endurance in patients with subacute or chronic MND, and at 6-month follow-up the differences were only significant in endurance and in sagittal plane active mobility. In the TENS group, no significant improvement was detected. With regard to other variables, MT improved mobility and endurance more effectively than TENS at post-intervention and at 6-month follow-up in the sagittal plane. Only MT generated significant improvements in cervical mobility and endurance in the three movement planes.
Highlights
Nowadays neck pain is a frequent health problem associated with modern lifestyles [1], and is thought to affect between 21 and 71% of the population at some point in their lives [2].Between 30% and 50% of the adult population reports having experienced neck pain in the previous year [3], and 50% to 85% of patients with neck pain will report neck pain 1 to 5 years later [4]
A multi-centered randomized clinical trial was performed in order to compare the effectiveness of Manual therapy (MT) versus transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) in patients diagnosed with subacute and chronic mechanical neck disorders (MND)
In this study 47 and 43 patients were included in the MT and TENS group, respectively, between May 2005 and May 2007
Summary
Nowadays neck pain is a frequent health problem associated with modern lifestyles [1], and is thought to affect between 21 and 71% of the population at some point in their lives [2].Between 30% and 50% of the adult population reports having experienced neck pain in the previous year [3], and 50% to 85% of patients with neck pain will report neck pain 1 to 5 years later [4]. Nowadays neck pain is a frequent health problem associated with modern lifestyles [1], and is thought to affect between 21 and 71% of the population at some point in their lives [2]. Musculoskeletal disorders, including chronic neck pain, produce increasing problems for patients and national economies [2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. The themes of disability deriving from chronic pain of the spine and appropriate approach to its treatment are current research topics in this field [15]. The annual prevalence of neck pain with disability, but without structural damage, varies between 1.7% and 11.5% in the general population [16].
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