Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Introduction Massage therapy (MT) is frequently used in children. No study has systematically assessed its safety in children and adolescents. We systematically review adverse events (AEs) associated with paediatric MT.
Methods We searched seven electronic databases from inception to December 2018. We included studies if they (1) were primary studies published in a peer-reviewed journal, (2) involved children aged 0–18 years and (3) a type of MT was used for any indication. No restriction was applied to language, year of publication and study design. AEs were classified based on their severity and association to the intervention.
Results Literature searches identified 12 286 citations, of which 938 citations were retrieved for full-text evaluation and 60 studies were included. In the included studies, 31 (51.6%) did not report any information on AEs, 13 (21.6%) reported that no AE occurred and 16 studies (26.6%) reported at least one AE after MT. There were 20 mild events (grade 1) that resolved with minimal intervention, 26 moderate events (grades 2–3) that required medical intervention, and 18 cases of severe AEs (grades 4–5) that resulted in hospital admission or prolongation of hospital stay; of these, 17 AEs were volvulus in premature infants, four of which were ultimately fatal events.
Conclusion We identified a range of AEs associated with MT use, from mild to severe. Unfortunately, the majority of included studies did not report if an AE occurred or not, leading to publication bias. This review reports an association between abdominal massage with volvulus without malrotation in preterm infants; it is still to be defined if this is casual or not, but our findings warrant caution in the use of abdominal massage in preterm infants.
- musculo-skeletal
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Correction notice This article has been corrected since it was published. Name for the first author has been corrected.
Contributors SV, HJ and TD conceptualised and designed the study, reviewed and critically reviewed the manuscript for important intellectual content. MK, LZ and MF designed the data collection instruments, collected data, carried out the initial analyses, drafted the manuscript, and reviewed and revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final manuscript as submitted and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available on reasonable request. All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as online supplementary information. This is a systematic review and all data have already been published and/or presented in the review. No meta-analysis was done.