| Objective: To evaluate the effect of spinal manipulation on motor control and feedback processes in health individuals. Design: Pilot study. Setting and Participants: Eight participants recruited from a private chiropractic practice and from a chiropractic college. Intervention: Participants were assigned either to a treatment or control group and learned a cervical spine rotation task to 3 targets: 30o (left rotation, 0o (centre) and 20o (right rotation). Treatment participants received cervical spine manipulation between acquisition (knowledge of results trials) and retention (no knowledge of results trials). Control participants received cervical spine orthopaedic procedures between acquisition and retention. Main Outcome Measures: To evaluate whether high velocity, low amplitude cervical spine manipulation would improve cervical spine rotation accuracy and variability compared to a control group. Dependent measures included absolute error, variable error and total variability. Results: There was no significant difference between groups in acquisition. Significance was found between groups during retention for the right (20o) and centre (0o) targets only. Conclusions: Cervical spine joint manipulation improved overall movement accuracy and overall movement variability but did not improve participant individual variability. This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher; full text (print only) by subscription.
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