Osteopathy in the Cranial Field as a Method to Enhance Brain Injury Recovery: A Preliminary Study

The clinical burden of traumatic brain injury (TBI) continues to grow worldwide, with patients often developing chronic neurological, behavorial, and cognitive deficits. Treatment and management strategies remain a key challenge, given that they target the symptoms and not the underlying pathological response. To advance pre-clinical research and therapeutic developments, there is a need to study treatment strategies that improve brain injury recovery. Cranial osteopathic manipulative medicine (cOMM) is a non-invasive and non-pharmacological strategy that has been shown to improve quality of life for several medical conditions and injuries, and may be able to treat TBI and reduce subsequent symptoms. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the neurobiological effect of cOMM on the injury response and its potential to alleviate symptoms. We investigated the ability of cOMM to enhance fluid transport by quantifying fluorescent tracer clearance throughout the brain. Further, using an in vivo TBI model, male rats were exposed to a repeated blast overpressure that was followed by cOMM treatment 24 h later. Our findings indicated that cOMM treatment attenuated acute and subacute anxiety-like behaviors. Post-mortem pathological examination in the hippocampus, pre-frontal, and motor cortices indicated improvements in glial pathology in cOMM-treated animals compared to the untreated injury group. Overall, this is the first study to explore cOMM as a treatment option for brain injury, demonstrating its capability to improve TBI outcomes.