Lumbar Disc Regression & Music’s Effect On Dementia

The Chiropractic Forward Podcast: Evidence-based Chiropractic Advocacy

CF 341: Lumbar Disc Regression & Music’s Effect On Dementia Today we’re going to talk about Lumbar Disc Regression & Music’s Effect On Dementia But first, here’s that sweet sweet bumper music

Purchase Dr. Williams’s book, a perfect educational tool and chiropractic research reference for the daily practitioner, from the Amazon store TODAY!

OK, we are back and you have found the Chiropractic Forward Podcast where we are giving evidence-based chiropractic a little personality and making it profitable. We’re not the stuffy, elitist, pretentious kind of research. We’re research talk over a couple of beers.

So grab you a bushel.

I’m Dr. Jeff Williams and I’m your host for the Chiropractic Forward podcast. I’m so glad you’re spending your time with us learning together. Chiropractors – I’m hiring at my personal clinic. I need talent, ambition, smarts, personality, and easy to get along with associates.

If this is you and Amarillo, TX is your speed, send me an email at [e-mail] If you haven’t yet I have a few things you should do.

• Go to Amazon and check our my book called The Remarkable Truth About Chiropractic: A Unique Journey Into The Research. It’s excellent resource for you and is categorized into sections so the information is easy to find and written in a way that is easy to understand for everyone. It’s on Amazon. That’s the Remarkable Truth About Chiropractic by Jeff Williams.
• Like our Chiropractic Forward Facebook page,
• Join our private Chiropractic Forward Facebook group, and then
• Review our podcast on wherever you listen to it
• Last thing real quick, we also have an evidence-based brochure and poster store at chiropracticforward.com

You have found yourself smack dab in the middle of Episode #341 Now if you missed last week’s episode, we talked about Semaglutide And Kidneys & Trying To Target Just One Vertebra Make sure you don’t miss that info. Keep up with the class.

On the personal end of things…..

Another day, another dollar my friends. I hope you’re all doing well. Let’s talk about back-to-school, shall we? I don’t know about you, but for me, historically, we experience a sincere slow down during back-to-school. I can’t explain it. I mean, school supplies and new clothes will set you back for sure but, for the most part, our patient population isn’t affected too much by that financially. At least that’s what I’d think.

But, nevertheless, it slows up and I’ve been gone a ton this summer so it seems already to be a little slow for us so…..yeah, we’ll keep an eye on that. Remember, I say it over and over, when you have your traditional slow times, just recall that you didn’t make everyone mad. It’s not your fault, it’ll come back when the dust settles. Just take that time to take a course, meet with your staff more, do the things you never have time to do and make sure you’re marketing is on point. Use the time. Time is one of those things; you either invest in your time or you waste your time. Don’t waste it. Also, I had an amazing patient. One of those that you’d love for your clinic to be filled with all day every day.

She’d sing our praises online.

She’d be excited to be here all of the time every time. Just a ray of sunshine.

Then, she just quit coming to see us. At all. It’s been about a year now and since I’m an over thinker about literally everything, it’s weighed on me and worried me. Are we doing something wrong? Did we make her mad and didn’t realize it? How were we able to actually run off one of our very closest and favorite patients? What could have possibly gone wrong? I don’t want to contact her because that would be an intrusion, blah, blah blah.

Well, I said hell with it today. Just this morning I decided that I’d send her a message. After all, we’re friends! I basically apologized for intruding but that I wanted to reach out because she’s been heavy on my mind. I explained that she used to come see us all the time and now we don’t see her at all. I wanted to know if I did something I was unaware of and if I somehow upset her, I want to apologize, explain, or make it right.

Basically, she said, “Hey sunshine!” Which was a good start I thought. Then she told me that she found herself in a divorce and depressed and even considered suicide. She said she’s in a much better place now and wanted to get back out and start going places again but didn’t want to have to explain to everyone about where she’s been. Which is exactly what I asked, by the way.

But she was amazing, it wasn’t me or my staff that ran her off, and she’s making an appointment to get her butt back in here. I told her that we’d be happy to see her and that we could hug it out when she gets here. Which is OK. Some patients are closer to us than others and I can totally hug this one. So, don’t overthink it and, if your relationship is at a point you feel comfortable and you think someone needs to be checked on, reach out. I be they’d appreciate it.

Alright, let’s get to the research.

Item #1

The first one today is called, “Systematic review and meta-analysis of predictive factors for spontaneous regression in lumbar disc herniation” by Rashed et al and published in Journal of Neurosurgery in July of 2023 Remember, the citations can be found at chiropracticforward.com under this episode. Volume 39: Issue 4 (Oct 2023) in Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine Figure from Zancolli et al. (pp 593–599). Left panel: © Anne Pecsek, published with permission. https://thejns.org/spine/view/journals/j-neurosurg-spine/39/4/article-p471.xml

Why They Did It

Relatively little evidence exists on predictive factors for the spontaneous regression of lumbar disc herniation (LDH), although it is a well-documented phenomenon. Therefore, current care is not optimized to identify those who would benefit from early surgery versus those who could avoid surgical risks and pursue nonsurgical therapy. In this study, the authors aimed to analyze and summarize all literature to date on predictive factors for spontaneous disc regression as well as suggest future research strategies to aid in the decision-making for this cohort.

How They Did It

A literature search was conducted of the Cochrane, Embase, and MEDLINE databases for articles that described LDH in terms of the North American Spine Society task force definitions: bulging, protruded, extruded, and sequestered disc morphologies. All articles described a nonsurgical primary symptomatic LDH cohort with at least two MR images to assess regression. The primary outcome was to assess the probability of disc regression for each disc morphology, with a secondary analysis for any other predictive factors identified.

The authors synthesized their results with the only previous review (examining articles published before March 2014) to comprehensively describe the literature. A qualitative analysis of the wider literature was also performed for those studies with differing definitions of LDH but meeting all remaining inclusion criteria.

What They Found

• Sixteen articles describing 360 cases of LDH were identified.
• Participants tended to be younger and male and presented with radiculopathy and L4–5 or L5–S1 LDH.
• The mean time to follow-up imaging was 11.5 months.
• The probabilities of spontaneous regression with bulging, protruded, extruded, and sequestered discs were 13.3%, 52.5%, 70.4%, and 93.0%, respectively.
• Extruded and sequestered discs were also significantly more likely to completely regress than smaller morphologies.
• Other predictors of regression were larger baseline herniation volume, transligamentous herniation, and higher Komori types.
• The authors also found similar trends in qualitative data as well as confirmed that symptom improvement was associated with disc regression.

Wrap It Up

This study shows further evidence of the influence of disc morphology on predicting disc regression as well as provides the first meta-analysis of data indicating additional predictive factors. Item #2 The last one this week is called, “Age and familiarity effects on musical memory” by Suave et al and published July 24, 2024, and holy schnikeys! That’s some seriously hot stuff!

• https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305969

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305969

Why They Did It

A common complaint in older adults is trouble with their memory, especially for new information. Current knowledge about normal aging and changes in memory identify a divide between memory tasks that are unaffected by aging and those that are. Among the unaffected are recognition tasks. These memory tasks rely on accessing well-known information, often include environmental support, and tend to be automatic. Negative age effects on memory are often observed at both encoding and during recall. Older adults often have difficulty with recall tasks, particularly those that require effortful self-initiated processing, episodic memory, and retention of information about contextual cues. Research in memory for music in healthy aging suggests a skill-invariance hypothesis: that age effects dominate when general-purpose cognitive mechanisms are needed to perform the musical task at hand, while experience effects dominate when music-specific knowledge is needed to perform the task The goals of this pair of studies were to investigate the effects of age and familiarity on musical memory in the context of real pieces of music, and to compare a live concert experimental setting with a lab-based experimental setting.

How They Did It

• Participants’ task was to click a button (or press the spacebar) when they heard the target theme in three pieces of music.
• One was a Mozart piece and the others were original pieces commissioned for this study, one tonal and one atonal.
• Participants heard the relevant theme three times before listening to a piece of music.
• Participants also completed two short cognitive tests and filled out a questionnaire collecting demographic information and a hearing abilities self-assessment.

What They Found

We find a significant effect of familiarity and setting but not of age or musical training on recognition performance More specifically, performance is best for the familiar, tonal piece, moderate for the unfamiliar tonal piece and worst for the unfamiliar atonal piece. Performance was better in the live setting than the lab setting.

Wrap It Up

The absence of an age effect provides encouraging evidence that music’s diverse cues may encourage cognitive scaffolding, in turn improving encoding and subsequent recognition. Better performance in an ecological versus lab setting supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field. OK, that’s great, they’re saying the musical mind may be more immune to dementia if we boil it down but Imma say this plainly and clearly; I’ve been playing the guitar at a moderate to high level for decades and if I ask you your name, Imma forget it in 5 seconds. Guaranteed So take what you want out of that but, in all honesty, I think it’s awesome. If being a music lover can help stave off dementia, then I know a lot of folks that are gonna be just fine.

Hopefully myself included. Alright, that’s it. Keep on keepin’ on. Keep changing our profession from your corner of the world. The world needs evidence-based, patient-centered practitioners driving the bus. The profession needs us in the ACA and involved in leadership of state associations. So quit griping about the profession if you’re doing nothing to make it better. Get active, get involved, and make it happen. Let’s get to the message. Same as it is every week.

Store Remember the evidence-informed brochures and posters at chiropracticforward.com.

Purchase Dr. Williams’s book, a perfect educational tool and chiropractic research reference for the daily practitioner, from the Amazon store TODAY!

The Message

I want you to know with absolute certainty that when Chiropractic is at its best, you can’t beat the risk vs reward ratio because spinal pain is primarily a movement-related pain and typically responds better to movement-related treatment rather than chemical treatments like pills and shots. When compared to the traditional medical model, research and clinical experience show us patients can get good to excellent results for headaches, neck pain, back pain, and joint pain to name just a few. It’s safe and cost-effective can decrease surgeries & disability and we do it through conservative, non-surgical means with minimal hassle to the patient. And, if the patient treats preventatively after initial recovery, we can usually keep it that way while raising the overall level of health!

Key Point: At the end of the day, patients should have the guarantee of having the best treatment that offers the least harm. When it comes to non-complicated musculoskeletal complaints…. That’s Chiropractic!

Contact Send us an email at dr dot williams at chiropracticforward.com and let us know what you think of our show and tell us your suggestions for future episodes. Feedback and constructive criticism is a blessing and so are subscribes and excellent reviews on podcast platforms. We know how this works by now. If you value something, you have to share it, interact with it, review it, talk about it from time to time, and actively hit a few buttons to support it here and there when asked. It really does make a big difference.

Connect We can’t wait to connect with you again next week. From the Chiropractic Forward Podcast flight deck, this is Dr. Jeff Williams saying upward, onward, and forward.

Website http://www.chiropracticforward.com

Social Media Links https://www.facebook.com/chiropracticforward/

Chiropractic Forward Podcast Facebook GROUP https://www.facebook.com/groups/1938461399501889/

Twitter https://twitter.com/Chiro_Forward

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtc-IrhlK19hWlhaOGld76Q

iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/chiropractic-forward-podcast-chiropractors-practicing/id1331554445?mt=2

Player FM Link https://player.fm/series/2291021

Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-chiropractic-forward-podcast-chiropractors-practicing-through

TuneIn https://tunein.com/podcasts/Health–Wellness-Podcasts/The-Chiropractic-Forward-Podcast-Chiropractors-Pr-p1089415/

About the Author & Host Dr. Jeff Williams – Fellow of the International Academy of Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine (FIANM) and Board Certified Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Professionals (DABFP) – Chiropractor in Amarillo, TX, Chiropractic Advocate, Author, Entrepreneur, Educator, Businessman, Marketer, and Healthcare Blogger & Vlogger

The post Lumbar Disc Regression & Music’s Effect On Dementia appeared first on Chiropractic Forward.