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

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. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12906-018-2324-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.