Efficiancy of Chiropractic Manual Therapy on Infant Colic
by Joyce E. Miller, BS, DC, ET AL.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the efficiency of chiropractic manual therapy for infants with unexplained crying behavior and if there was any effect of parental reporting bias.

Methods: Infants with unexplained, persistant crying (infant colic) were recruited between October 2007 and November 2009 at a chiropractic teaching clinic in the United Kingdom. Infants younger than 8 weeks were randomized to one of three groups: (i) infant treated, parent aware; (ii) infant treated, parent unaware; and (iii) infant not treated, parent unaware. The primary outcome was a daily crying diary completed by parents over a period of 10 days. Treatments were pragmatic individualized to examination findings, and consisted of chiropractic manual therapy of the spine. Analysis of covariance was used to investigate differences between groups.

Results: One hundred four patients were randomized. In parents blinded to treatment allocation, using two or less hours of crying per day to determine clinically significant improvement in crying time, the increased odds of improvement in treated infants compared with those not receiving treatment were statistically significant at day eight (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 8.1; 95% confidence interval [C1], 1.4-45.0) and at day 10 (adjusted OR, 11.8; 95% C1, 2.1-68.3). The number needed to treat was three. In contrast, the odds of improvement in treated infants were not significantly different in blinded compared with non-blinded parents (adjusted ORs, 0.7 [95% C1, 0.2-2.0] and 0.5 [95% CI, 01.-1.6] at days 8 and 10, respectively.

Conclusions: In this study, chiropractic manual therapy improved crying behavior in infants with colic. The findings showed that knowledge of treatment by the parent did not appear to contribute to the observed treatment effects in this study. Thus, it is unlikely that observed treatment effect is due to bias on the part of the reporting parent.