Does Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment Induce Autonomic Changes in Healthy Participants? A Thermal Imaging Study

Osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) has been demonstrated to be an effective
therapy in several clinical conditions and age groups. Despite the clinical effectiveness,
lack of robust data in terms of neurobiological, specifically autonomic, mechanisms of
action is observed. Preliminary studies showed a parasympathetic effect leading to a
trophotropic effect of OMT. However, these data are limited to heart rate variability (HRV)
analysis. In order to study further the role of OMT on the autonomic nervous system,
a cross-over randomized controlled trial RCT has been designed to test the effect of
osteopathic treatment compared to sham therapy on a range of autonomic parameters.
Thermal images, HRV and skin conductance data were collected on a sample of healthy
adults. The study design consisted of two sessions (OMT and SHAM), 1 treatment per
week, lasting 35 min each, composed of 5 min of baseline, 25 min of treatment, and
5 min of post-touch. During the baseline and the post-treatment, participants received
no touch. Thirty-seven participants (aged 27 5 years old, male ratio 40%) completed
the study. Multivariate analysis showed a significant parasympathetic effect of group
as well as of epoch on thermographic data of the nose (estimate 0.38; 95% CI 0.12–
0.63; p < 0.01), left (0.17; 0.06–0.27; <0.001) and right (0.16; 0.07–0.24; <0.001)
perioral as well as on the forehead (0.07; 0.01–0.12; <0.01) regions but not for the
chin (0.08; 0.02 to 0.18; 0.13). Consistent with a parasympathetic effect, analyses
demonstrated a difference between OMT and sham groups on the nuHF (p < 0.001)
and DFA-a1 (p < 0.01) as well as on skin conductance (<0.01). The present research
supports the hypothesis that a single session of OMT as compared to sham induces
autonomic consequences in healthy non-symptomatic adults.