Efficacy of Myofascial Release in Patients With Axial Spondyloarthritis.

Overview

Axial spondyloarthritis (AS), is a chronic and disabling disease that mainly affects young people, generating clear limitations in mobility and functional capacity in patients who develop this disease. Although pharmacological treatment is the basis of the therapeutic treatment of (AS), non-pharmacological treatment is a fundamental complement that guarantees the optimization of movement patterns, in turn favoring independence in the basic activities of life daily through the management and control of the derived signs and symptoms. Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of physiotherapy in treating symptoms in patients with AS, one of these studies is the Cochrane review developed by Dagfinrud et al. One of the techniques described by the Cochrane Review in the management of symptoms is orthopedic manual therapy (OMT), defined as a specialized area of physical therapy used for the treatment of neuro-musculoskeletal conditions, based on clinical reasoning, using approaches highly specific treatment plans that include manual techniques and therapeutic exercises. Among these manual techniques, it includes myofascial induction as the primary technique of choice for the management of soft tissue and fascial system restrictions, it has been shown to be in rheumatic diseases such as fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis, as well as in non-inflammatory mechanical diseases such as non-specific low back pain, a low-cost, rapid therapeutic action strategy with sustained gains over time in managing global symptoms. Currently, the effects of myofascial induction on the mobility and function of patients with AS are unknown, despite the excellent results that these techniques have shown in dysfunctions of non-autoimmune musculoskeletal origin. For this reason, this study will seek to evaluate the efficacy of myofascial release compared to sham therapy in joint range of motion in patients diagnosed with axial spondyloarthritis.

Trial design: Controlled parallel double blind superiority clinical trial. Participants of the trial: Patients with a diagnosis of axial spondyloarthritis, of legal age, attending the rheumatology service of an outpatient clinic in the city of Bogotá. Planned trial period: The intervention per participant is designed to develop 6 therapy sessions 2 times per week over the course of 3 weeks. It is not planned to follow up the participants in time after the end of the study and treatment time. The total duration of the project will be 4 months while the necessary population is recruited to complete the sample size.