Massage Therapy in Children with Asthma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Ji Wu Xi-Wen Yang, and Ming Zhang · Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine · 2017 May 18

DOI 10.1155/2017/5620568

Objective

To systematically evaluate the efficacy of massage, a traditional treatment method of traditional Chinese medicine on children with asthma.

Conclusions

This systematic review indicated that traditional Chinese massage therapy (Tuina) and herbal medicine significantly improved the positive effect on children with asthma. Children reported to have improvement on the pulmonary function parameters of large airway, reduces the plasma concentrations of PAF and prostaglandin, and increases the levels of PAF-AH and DP1

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Insights

Traditional Chinese massage therapy can effectively treat asthma and significantly improve pulmonary function in children.

In this meta-analysis, we evaluated the effects of massage on treatment of children asthma. The findings produced by the fixed-effects model indicate that massage therapy can significantly increase the efficacy of the treatment on children asthma and improve pulmonary function index FEV1 and PEF. However, we could not conclude the favorable mechanism of massage in the overall meta-analysis due to the small number of articles. All studies have shown that massage therapy has a significantly positive effect on children with asthma, improves the pulmonary function parameters of large airway, reduces the plasma concentrations of PAF and prostaglandin, and increases the levels of PAF-AH and DP1; therefore, it greatly improves pulmonary function. However, the limited research designs of included studies lead to high risk of bias. More randomized controlled trials with better methodological quality are needed to further confirm the effectiveness of massage.