| Summary: | 碩士 === 慈濟大學 === 神經科學研究所 === 97 === Low back pain (LBP) causes inconvenience in daily life and professional career. The pain might exacerbate disability and increase work load. In the past 25 years, the medical costs for LBP patients have markedly raised.
Previous studies revealed that heart rate response might be an objective indicator for pain. The acceleration of heart rate could be related to enhanced sympathetic activity. The aims of this study were, firstly, to observe the differences of pain, disability and heart rate variability (HRV) parameters after physical agent modalities.
Secondly, we would like to determine any correlations between the changes of pain and HRV parameters. We applied the physical agent modalities on 73 LBP patients (38 men, 35 women). Electrocardiography (ECG) data for analysis were collected before and after treatment. Frequency-domain analysis of the stationary R-R intervals (R-R) was performed to quantify the total power (TP), the low frequency power (LF), the high frequency power (HF), normalized low-frequency power (LF%), normalized high-frequency power (HF%) and the low to high frequency power ratio (LF/HF) of heart rate variability. Pain was evaluation with visual analogue scale and disability was assessed by Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Questionnaire. To our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate increased RR, TP, LF and HF in LBP patients after physical agent modalities. These results indicated that increased parasympathetic regulation in LBP patients after physical agent modalities. These phenomena were also found in 38 male patients rather than 35 female patients. The pain and disability significantly decreased regardless of the gender and disease entity. There was positive correlation between the change percentages of pain and HF% for all and male patients.
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