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The problem
Intervention: Parent-administered massage alone or combined with tactile, kinesthetic, oral or other developmental sensory components, compared with routine care or non-massage controls
Who it was tested with: Preterm or low-birth-weight infants and their parents, across 24 randomized controlled trials.
Children or communities are compared with a group that did not receive the intervention, or followed over years. This is the design that best separates what the intervention did from everything else that changed.
"systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials" - pooling randomized trials with comparison groups fits the experimental tier, and the outcome direction is mixed because feeding and stay outcomes improved while growth and motor outcomes did not.
Very high heterogeneity for weight gain, small-study effects, low or very low certainty for several outcomes, and multimodal interventions that prevent isolating the effect of massage. Parental psychological outcomes were only synthesized narratively.
Across countries and designs
1 study · 1 country
