THE EFFECT OF SPINAL MANIPULATION AS COMPLEMENTARY THERAPY FOR PARKINSON’S DISEASE SYMPTOMATOLOGY: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Background: Parkinson Disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disease with no known cure. As a result, patients with this diagnosis engage in treatments focussing on the reduction and/or alleviation of symptoms. In the past, several case studies involving spinal manipulation (SM) have reported successful reduction in symptomatology. Objective: To review the current literature on spinal manipulation (SM) and the associated outcomes on PD symptomatology. Methods: A review of literature was conducted using Academic Search Premier, CINAHL Complete, MEDLINE Complete, Primary Search, Alt HealthWatch, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, EBSCOhost, PubMed, and Index to Chiropractic Literature. Results: Only 14 articles were retrieved for this literature review. We found that the quality of the cases studies to be generally strong. One of the weakness of the articles retrieved is that there was only 1 study that involved a sham compared to SM. Some of the articles used Parkinson’s Questionnaire to obtain reports pre and post-treatment, while others relied solely on patient subjective reports. One of the issues in tracking Parkinson’s symptoms is that they vary from patient to patient and there is no gold standard for tracking disease progress.  Conclusion: SM appears to have a positive outcome for patients; various reports of decreased symptomology in relation to PD suggests promise for those who suffer from PD. However, due to the wide array of influence that SM exerts on the central nervous system, a limitation of the current research is the absence of substantia nigra imaging both pre and post SM.