Multidisciplinary rehabilitation intervention on mobility and hemodynamics of joint contracture animal model

Joint contracture causes a decrease in range of motion (ROM), which severely affects activities of daily living of patients. We have investigated the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary rehabilitation on joint contracture by rat model.

We used 60 Wistar rats in this study. The rats were divided into five groups as follows: group 1 was the normal control group; except the group 1, we created left hind limb knee joint contracture using Nagai method for other four groups. The joint contracture modeling group 2 was the model control group for monitoring the spontaneous recovery, and other three groups were given different rehabilitation treatments; for example, group 3 was treadmill running group; group 4 was medication group; group 5 was treadmill running plus medication group. The left hind limbs knee joint ROM and the femoral blood flow indicators (FBFI) including PS, ED, RI, and PI were measured right before and after the 4 weeks of rehabilitation.

After 4 weeks of rehabilitation treatments, the measured values of ROM and FBFI are compared with the corresponding values of group 2. Firstly, we did not see clear difference in the values of ROM and FBFI for group 2 before and after 4 weeks spontaneous recovery. The improvement of left lower limb ROM for group 4 and group 5 as compared to the group 2 was statistically significant (p < 0.05), whereas a less recovery for group 3 was observed. However as compared to the group 1, we did not observe full recovery in ROM of group 4 and group 5 after 4 weeks of rehabilitation. The PS and ED level for rehabilitation treatment groups was significantly higher than those modeling ones (Tables 2, 3,  Figs. 4, 5), while the RI and PI values show the contrary trends (Tables 4, 5, Figs. 6, 7).

Our results indicate that multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatments had a curative effect on both contracture of joints and the abnormal femoral circulations.