The impact of closed versus open kinetic chain exercises on osteoporotic femur neck and risk of fall in postmenopausal women.
Ali Abd El-Monsif Thabet, Mansour Abdullah Alshehri, Omar Farouk Helal and 1 others
PMID 28931999WHAT IT FOUND
Closed kinetic chain exercises improved femoral neck bone density and fall risk more than open kinetic chain exercises in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.
Both groups changed, but the study had no non-exercise control.
Key findings
01Closed kinetic chain exercises significantly increased femoral neck BMD and significantly decreased fall risk after four months, while open kinetic chain exercises did not significantly increase BMD.
02The reported values moved from -2.9 to -2.4 for BMD and from 4.1 to 3.1 for fall risk in the closed group, and from -2.9 to -2.8 for BMD and from 4.2 to 3.9 for fall risk in the open group.
03After treatment, the two groups differed significantly in BMD and fall risk, with the closed group showing more notable improvements.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample was small: 40 women, with 20 in each group. There was no non-exercise control group, so the study cannot show either programme is better than doing nothing. Each group received several exercises together, so the effect of any single exercise cannot be separated. The paper did not report blinding, allocation concealment, dropouts, or adherence. The outcomes were surrogate measures: femoral neck BMD values and a fall-risk score, not fracture or fall events. The follow-up was four months, so long-term effects are unknown. The reporting of the open-chain fall-risk result is inconsistent: the text says p>0.05 while the table marks p<0.05. The BMD values are given as negative numbers without explaining the scale or clinical meaning.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that closed-chain exercises prevent fractures or that any one exercise is proven superior. The study measured surrogate BMD and a fall-risk score, had no non-exercise control, and gave each group several exercises together, so it cannot separate the effect of leg press, bicycling, Stairmaster climbing, or the open-chain movements.