A new study out of the University of Calgary suggests that active, hands-on physiotherapy could speed up an athlete’s return to sport following a concussion.

Most people recover from a concussion within seven to ten days and the current standard treatment for post-concussion symptoms is rest followed by graded exertion.

A small percentage of those people suffer from prolonged symptoms and so a study was initiated to see if a new approach could decrease recovery times for those individuals.

The study was conducted by Kathryn Schneider, a researcher with the Faculty of Kinesiology's Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre, at the U of C.

Schneider’s study suggests that physiotherapy concussion treatment that combines treatment of the cervical spine, the vertebrae in the neck, and vestibular system, the inner ear, is four times more likely to lead to an athlete's medical clearance for return to sport by eight weeks.

31 patients took part in the research and were divided into two groups; a standard vestibular rehabilitation protocol of rest followed by graded exertion and a protocol that combined vestibular rehabilitation with cervical spine physiotherapy.

The results showed that patients in the experimental treatment group were much more likely to be cleared for sport after eight weeks.

In addition, 73 percent of the participants were medically cleared within eight weeks after starting treatment, compared with just seven percent of the control groups.

"I was somewhat surprised at how compelling the results were," said Schneider. "We've believed that treatment of the cervical spine and vestibular systems seem to help, but this study suggests that this approach may be of great benefit for those suffering from prolonged post-concussion symptoms including dizziness, neck pain and / or headaches."

She says the results suggest that a new "hands-on active physiotherapy" approach might be more effective treatment for post-concussion symptoms.

 "Manual therapy is believed to decrease pain and improve function through a variety of biomechanical and neurophysiological effects, which might explain the encouraging results we noted in this study."

The research was published in the online May 22 edition of the British Journal of Sport Medicine.