Phase Angle as an Assessment Tool in the Context of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain and Ion Cyclotron Resonance Treatments: A Pilot Observational Study

Background/Objectives: Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain (CMP) is a rather widespread and heterogeneous health problem whose evaluated framework can be of fundamental importance to intervene effectively and rapidly on the causes and consequences of the pathology, as well as on the dominant symptom of pain. One of the evaluation parameters that is increasingly gaining consensus in the assessment of the health status is the Phase Angle (PA), obtained through bioelectrical monitoring with body Bioimpedance Analysis (BIA); Methods: To evaluate the reliability of the PA as a tool for assessing CMP, data from 53 patients, with an average age of 60 years, were observed. They underwent assessment of perceived pain using the Numeric Pain Rating Scale (NPRS) and of the body's bioelectrical status using the BIA, before the beginning (T0) and after the end (T1) of a cycle of 10 treatment sessions with Ion Cyclotron Resonance - Bioresonance Therapy (ICR-BT); Results: At the end of the observation we detected a significant reduction in the NPRS value and a positive but not statistically significant increase in the PA value. Furthermore, given the misalignment in the significance of the positive trend of the two observed variables, it was not possible to define a clear correlation between pain and the bioimpedenziometric values ​​of patients. Conclusions: The study confirms the efficacy of ICR-BT as a therapeutic tool in the presence of CMP. However, it was not possible to define a clear reliability of PA as a diagnostic tool for CMP. Although PA has shown a promising trend during the study, its non-significant correlation to the pain trend would suggest investigating the topic more deeply, through larger and better structured experimental studies.