Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder & Chiropractic: Literature Review

Welcome to the Back to Health Chiropractic Podcast

I’m your host Dr. Marc Dupuis on this show we discuss tips, tools and strategies to improve the health & wellness of you and your family!

Today we are going to discuss a 2015 literature review, titled Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Chiropractic: A Systematic Review of the Literature.  This research review was published in the Journal Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health, in March of 2015.

This topic is so important and timely since Neurodevelopmental disorders include some of the most challenging health issues facing children today, namely, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). 

The rates of ADD, ADHD and ASD are rising within the global population at an alarming rate, while treatments seem to be sadly lagging behind.  Therefore, any intervention, especially those that are non-invasive & safe that shows promise should be looked at closely.  Despite there being numerous pharmaceutical drugs on the market for these conditions, their results are mixed and side effects are often just as troubling as the conditions they are supposed to be addressing.  

The Summary or Abstract of the review is as follows:
The objective: To provide a comprehensive analysis of the current body of scientific literature regarding the chiropractic management of a wide variety of neurodevelopmental disorders.

The Methods of the Review: A literature search was performed using PubMed, MANTIS, the Index to Chiropractic Literature, McCoy Press, Galileo, and ScienceDirect. Inclusion criteria consisted of full-text peer-reviewed articles written in English as they related to the efficacy of chiropractic management of neurodevelopmental disorders.

The Results: 50 articles were selected.  The results were: 3 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), 7 Reviews of Literature, 3 Case Series, 34 Case Studies and 3 Survey/Commentaries.

The Conclusions: The majority of articles dealt specifically with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD)/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and were predominantly case studies. While we believe there is enough evidence to support the use of chiropractic with children who have been previously diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, especially ASD and ADD/ADHD, the chiropractic community should see this as a call to action to provide more research regarding neurodevelopmental disorders.

Given that RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) are the gold standard of research, the authors acknowledged that although 3 RCTs supporting Chiropractic care for neurodevelopmental disorders is a great start, we need to fund additional research projects to build upon these initial studies.  

Lets dive deeper into this research review.  Now, what does Chiropractic care have to do with neurodevelopmental disorders?  For those of you not familiar with HOW chiropractic actually works, the answer is quite simple.  The MAIN goal of chiropractic care is to improve brain-body, body-brain communication.  We do that by analyzing the spine for abnormally positioned or abnormally moving spinal segments, known as vertebral subluxations.  Vertebral subluxations are corrected by specific chiropractic adjustments. Because vertebral subluxations, by the stress caused to the surrounding spinal cord and nerve roots, cause nervous system interference, it should make sense that correcting vertebral subluxations reduces nervous system interference and therefore could help those suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders.   

It is important to note: people alway ask, does chiropractic cure this or fix so and so conditions?  The answer is no, chiropractic