Document is current

Article History

Received: 10 April 2025

Accepted: 17 November 2025

First Online: 28 November 2025

Declarations

:

: This study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College and all participants provided written informed consent prior to participating in the study.

: Not applicable. No individual person data included.

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: Our study was retrospectively registered. We began planning for this study in September 2020. Our planning was derailed due to ongoing changes to collecting data with live human participants due to COVID pandemic safety protocols, where we were unsure if our study would be allowed to proceed. When we finally received approval to collect data, we focused on ensuring the study protocol was following COVID protocols, and the study protocol registration was unintentionally oversighted. We recognize the potential for lack of transparency and the challenge a journal would have with distinguishing between confirmed and unexpected findings. However, we have clearly stated where exploratory analysis was completed and have uploaded our original research ethics board proposal to the Open Science Framework ( ), which outlines our full trial protocol, methods and data analysis. We are happy to provide the journal editors with the original proposal documents that have the time stamps from 2020 and 2021.