Identifying the Effects of Chiropractic Intervention on the Anterior Tibialis Muscle using High Density Surface Electromyography

Abstract

Understanding the muscle physiology allows scientists to work out new ways of training athletes, aiming to substantially improve their performance in a specified duration. It can also help researchers come up with new rehabilitation methods for patients recovering from injuries and muscle fatigue. The muscles require contraction and relaxation in a precise manner during a motor task. As a result, action potential propagates through the muscle fibers with certain conduction velocity (MFCV). This study aims at studying MFCV and how it can be enhanced allowing the subject to respond faster to a given stimulus using minimum amount of effort on part of the user. Chiropractic intervention is a type of alternate medicine that uses spinal stimulation to affect the subject’s ability to use his limbs effectively. The practice has been adopted as a rehabilitation technique for people suffering from spinal degeneration or injuries that may lead to neurological handicap of the patients. This research focuses on whether chiropractic spinal stimulation results in a change in the muscle physiology. A relatively new technique known as, ‘high density surface electromyography (HD sEMG)’ was adopted to measure the EMG signals during dorsiflexion from 12 subjects. Signal processing techniques such as Power Spectral Density (PSD), cross-correlation, root mean square (rms), most likelihood (ML) method, were used to identify modifications in the muscle physiology of the anterior tibialis muscle of all subjects during this protocoled exercise. Results show that chiropractic intervention has a significant impact on the MFCV. It also leads to an increase in the amount of force generated by the anterior tibialis muscle during dorsiflexion.