Cognitive Multisensory Rehabilitation and Remotely Delivered Spring Forest Qigong increases Body Awareness in Adults with Spinal Cord Injury

Research Objectives: To compare body awareness ability in adults with spinal cord injury (SCI) with uninjured adults. To investigate changes in body awareness ability after body awareness interventions (Cognitive Multisensory Rehabilitation (CMR) or Remote Qigong) in adults with SCI.

Design: Observational study. Pre-post design.

Setting: Brain Body Mind Lab, University of Minnesota.

Participants: We recruited 59 adults with SCI (22 women and 37 men), mean age of 53.66 ± 13.58 years, and 15.39 ± 13.55 mean years post-SCI injury. Forty-one adults with SCI had paraplegia and 18 had tetraplegia. Twenty-four had complete and 35 had an incomplete SCI lesion. We recruited 32 uninjured healthy adults (22 women and 10 men), mean age of 40.03 ± 17.14 years.

Interventions: Thirty-three participants received CMR for 6 weeks (1:1 in person, 3x/week, 45min/session). CMR aims at restoring awareness of where the body is in space and where the body is in relation to other body parts. Eighteen participants completed 12 weeks of remotely Delivered Spring Forest Qigong with an online video called “Five Element Qigong Healing Movements” (at least 3x/week, 45min/session). This Qigong practice aims at restoring body awareness through gentle movements, mindfulness, and breathing. Participants combined active movements to the best of their ability with kinesthetic imagery.

Main Outcome Measures: Body awareness was assessed at baseline using the Revised Body Awareness Rating Questionnaire (BARQ-R) with lower scores indicating better body awareness in adults with SCI and uninjured controls. Additionally, the BARQ-R was assessed after the body awareness interventions in adults with SCI.

Results: Adults with SCI scored higher on the BARQ-R (17.05 ± 5.14) compared to uninjured adults (10.84 ± 5.14), indicating adults with SCI had lower body awareness, p<.0001. After the body awareness interventions, adults with SCI improved in body awareness compared to baseline (change score: 2.07 ± 5.35), p=.0022, d=0.37.

Conclusions: This study confirms that adults with SCI have lower body awareness ability compared to uninjured adults. In addition, CMR and Remotely delivered Qigong can improve body awareness in adults with SCI.

Author(s) Disclosures: No conflict of interest.