A big milestone for us this year was celebrating Dr Kelly Holt being awarded his PhD by the University of Auckland. Kelly conducted a randomised controlled trial that investigated the effects of chiropractic care on sensorimotor function associated with falls risk in older adults.

In this trial Kelly found that after 12 weeks of chiropractic care older people had improved proprioception, reaction times, the ability to combine and process multisensory information, and they physically felt better compared to a control group. We’re looking forward to publishing these exciting results and following up with more research in this field.

Current Projects

The projects we are currently engaged in are looking at the effects of chiropractic care on muscle strength, pelvic floor muscle function, reading ability, children with learning and behavioural disorders, balance and falls in older people, stroke rehabilitation, brain computer interfaces, injury prevention, and a whole host of other aspects of nervous system function. These studies are potentially relevant to everyone from babies to older people and everyone in between. The results we are seeing continue to excite us and exceed our expectations.

One of the exciting studies that we are doing is a collaborative study with Professor Kemal Türker, Professor of Physiology at the Koc University School of Medicine in Turkey. The New Zealand College of Chiropractic, The Hamblin Trust and Spinal Research together made it possible for us to host Professor Türker in New Zealand for one month. He is one of the world’s leading neurophysiologists who specialises in spinal cord reflexes and is particularly interested in jaw function. Professor Türker, our NZ colleagues and we spent this month investigating how chiropractic care influences the way the brain controls motor neurons in the spine. While he was with us we were so excited with what we were seeing we completed a second study at the same time which is now in the publication process.

This excitement resulted in us pursuing this line of research further. Dr Imran Khan Niazi and myself went to Professor Türker’s lab in Turkey earlier this year to perform a follow-up pilot study that looks at how spinal adjustments influence the cranial nerves, in particular how they influence jaw function. Considering how chiropractic was founded this particular project could be very enlightening for the profession! We’re now ready to run the full study using the protocol we have piloted and are ready to jump into action and get this under way as soon as we secure the funding we need to complete the study.

This collaboration has also resulted in two more projects that we hope to do that will look at the effects of chiropractic care on strength and proprioception for an upper limb (shoulder) muscle and the effects of long term chiropractic care on lower limb muscle function. Again these projects are designed, piloted, and just waiting for the required funding needed to conduct them!

Help our research

Research Grants Needed

We have submitted this project to Spinal Research for a grant and it has been approved by both their clinical and scientific panels, however they do not yet have the funds to award us this grant. So as soon as we are able to raise enough money in conjunction with Spinal Research for this study then we will jump into action and get this under way immediately.

We have had an amazing couple of years at the New Zealand College of Chiropractic. We have established the Centre for Chiropractic Research, which is the Colleges dedicated research arm, and things are on the grow! At the start of 2013 there were only two of us doing research in the Centre, Dr Kelly Holt and Dr Heidi Haavik. However, we had some big plans in place.

Supporters Programme

We were about to launch a supporters programme to generate external research income, we were establishing incredible collaborative research partnerships with other research centres around the world, and we had strategic funding partnerships in place with Spinal Research and the Hamblin Trust in New Zealand to help support the growth and development of the Centre. As of right now we have 16 researchers collecting and analysing data in our labs and we are working on 20 active projects that we think are ground-breaking!

We expect to have more papers published over the next two years than we have published in the last eight years combined. None of this growth would have been possible without the amazing support we have received from the profession!

We need your help

If this also excites you, please join us by assisting with the funding needed to collect and analyse these studies by joining our Supporters Programme!

For details regarding how you can help please email supporters.programme@nzchiro.co.nz. We are literally chomping at the bit to get going with this work and just need to secure more funding to get it done!