Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Meta-Analysis
. 2018 Sep 18;18(1):257.
doi: 10.1186/s12906-018-2324-4.

Paediatric massage for treatment of acute diarrhoea in children: a meta-analysis

Li Gao  1 , Chunhua Jia  2 , Huiwen Huang  1
Affiliations
Meta-Analysis

Paediatric massage for treatment of acute diarrhoea in children: a meta-analysis

Li Gao et al. BMC Complement Altern Med. .

Abstract

Background: Massage therapy has been used by many traditional Chinese medicine physicians to treat acute diarrhoea in children. Since no relevant systematic reviews assessed the clinical effectiveness or the risk of massage therapy, in this study, a meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of paediatric massage for the treatment of acute diarrhoea in children.

Methods: In this meta-analysis, paediatric patients who were diagnosed with acute diarrhoea were included. Interventions using massage therapy alone or combined with other non-pharmacological approaches were included, while in the control groups, patients received pharmacotherapy. The primary outcome was clinical effective rate. Seven databases were used in our research, and the following search terms were used: (massage OR tui na OR manipulation OR acupressure) AND (infant OR child OR baby OR paediatrics) AND (diarrhoea OR diarrhoea) AND (randomized controlled trial). The search date was up to April 30, 2018.

Results: A total of 26 studies encompassing 2644 patients were included in this meta-analysis. It was shown that paediatric massage was significantly better than pharmacotherapy in treating acute diarrhoea in children in terms of clinical effective rate (n = 2213, RR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.14 to 1.27), clinical cure rate (n = 345, RR = 1.37, 95% CI: 1.19 to 1.57), and cure time (n = 513, MD = - 0.77, 95% CI: -0.89 to - 0.64). However, the quality of evidence for this finding was low due to high risk of bias of the included studies.

Conclusions: The present work supported paediatric massage in treating acute diarrhoea in children. More well-designed randomized controlled trials are still needed to further evaluate the efficacy of paediatric massage.

Keywords: Acute diarrhoea; Children; Massage therapy; Meta-analysis.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
PRISMA flow diagram
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Risk of bias graph: (a) risk of bias of all included studies; (b) Risk of bias summary
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Forest plot of clinical effective rate
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Subgroup analysis for montmorillonite alone and combined therapy
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Meta-analysis of clinical cure rate
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Forest plot of cure time (days)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Vos T, Barber RM, Bell B, Bertozzi-Villa A, Biryukov S, et al. Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 301 acute and chronic diseases and injuries in 188 countries, 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2013. Lancet. 2015;386(9995):743–800. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60692-4. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Caramia G, Silvi S, Verdenelli MC, Coman MM. Treatment of acute diarrhoea: past and now. Int J Enteric Pathog. 2015;3(4):e28612. doi: 10.17795/ijep28612. - DOI
    1. Lamberti LM, Walker CLF, Chan KY, Jian WY, Black RE. Oral zinc supplementation for the treatment of acute diarrhea in children: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrients. 2013;5(11):4715–4740. doi: 10.3390/nu5114715. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Li ST, Grossman DC, Cummings P. Loperamide therapy for acute diarrhea in children: systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Med. 2007;4(3):e98. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040098. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Moyer CA, Rounds J, Hannum JW. A meta-analysis of massage therapy research. Psychol Bull. 2004;130(1):3–18. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.130.1.3. - DOI - PubMed

Publication types