Here are the headlines for the week of May 7th, 2021.

News

A new kickstarter campaign has raised over HK$1.6million for the first bionic knee

The E-Knee claims to be an "intelligent knee support solution" and features compression, a 28-hour battery, and a control box. The device will retail for $469 USD per pair.

Source: E-Knee: Your Customized Intelligent Knee Support Solution

A new chiropractic school is coming to Kentucky, according to Dynamic Chiropractic.

The program will be part of a Christian institution, Campbellsville University, and plans to accept students during the 2021-22 academic year, as reported by Dennis Short, dean of chiropractic operations.

Source: Dynamic Chiropractic

Events

The World Federation of Chiropractic has announced their bi-annual Congress to be held September 23-25, 2021

The event, with the tagline "Chiropractic For A New Normal", will be 100% virtual this year, due to the uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: https://www.wfccongress.org/

Research

Rubber pillows and spring pillows may have better performance than feather pillows for neck pain, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis from Clinical Biomechanics

Source: Clinical Biomechanics

Authors identified clinical trials assessing the effect of different types of pillows on neck pain, waking symptoms, neck disability, sleep quality, and spinal alignment.

The meta-analysis revealed significant differences favouring the use of rubber pillows to reduce neck pain, reduce waking pain and neck disability, and enhance the satisfaction rate. Pillow designs did not appear to influence sleep quality in patients with chronic neck pain.

A meta-analysis failed to identify any moderators that would enable clinicians to identify which patients are likely to benefit more from spinal manipulative therapy

Source: https://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/fulltext/2021/04150/moderators_of_the_effect_of_spinal_manipulative.15.aspx

The study looked at individual participant data from 21 randomized control trials to analyze 23 potential patient moderators – things like duration of back pain, smoking, previous exposure to SMT.

The results showed small effects that did not represent minimally relevant differences.

A new systematic review reports an association between back pain and mortality in women and adults with more severe back pain.

Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-021-06732-6

Eric Roseen, et al. looked at eleven studies with over 80,000 participants. The presence of back pain in itself was not associated with an increase in mortality. However, back pain was associated with a modest increase in all-cause mortality in studies of women and among adults with more severe back pain.

Two conflicting papers have been published following the Global Summit on manipulation for non-musculoskeletal disorders

A large majority of participants in the Global Summit - which took place in September of 2019 - published their findings in an open-access systematic review in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies.

The authors' concluded that they found "no evidence of an effect of SMT for the management of non-musculoskeletal disorders" and recommended that "governments, payers, regulators, educators, and clinicians should consider this evidence when developing policies" and considering reimbursement for treatment.

Source: https://chiromt.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12998-021-00362-9

Following that publication, 4 participants in the Global Summit who declined authorship published another paper in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. The article in press shares concerns that the authors of the systematic review were "Extrapolating Beyond the Data" and making "sweeping policy implications" based on "weak scientific evidence."

Source: https://www.jmptonline.org/article/S0161-4754(21)00034-8/fulltext00034-8/fulltext)