[PDF] Occupational therapy for children with cerebral palsy: a systematic review | Semantic Scholar (2024)

The object of this systematic review was to determine whether OT interventions improve functional abilities and social participation in children with cerebral palsy.

The high-quality reviews found some evidence supporting strength training, constraint-induced movement therapy, or hippotherapy, and insufficient evidence on comprehensive physiotherapy and occupational therapy interventions, but most reviews drew no conclusions on the effectiveness of the reviewed interventions.

Evidence supports 40 intervention indications, with the greatest number at the activities‐level of the International Classification of Function, and yellow light interventions should be accompanied by a sensitive outcome measure to monitor progress and red light interventions could be discontinued because effective alternatives existed.

The findings showed that most clinics prefer to use a descriptive type to assess function in children with CP, and it was revealed that the pediatric institutions that agreed to participate in this study did not meet the current standards of assessment.

In one of the three RCTs a short-term, significant decrease of spasticity was found in favour of the botulinum toxin type A group, which was supported by five of the seven uncontrolled studies that also measured spasticITY.

There is limited evidence for the effectiveness of sensory re-education in patients with impaired sensibility of the hand due to a peripheral nerve injury, provided by a statistically significant improvement in sensibility found in one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

Elderly people and people with stroke or rheumatoid arthritis can expect to benefit from comprehensive OT, and evidence of the efficacy of OT in increasing functional abilities is shown.

No one treatment approach seems to be superior; however, injections of botulinum toxin A provide a supplementary benefit to a variety of upper-limb–training approaches as well as more-intensive approaches such as constraint-induced movement therapy and hand-arm bimanual intensive training.

There is a clear need to improve the quality of reporting of trials in this field, and authors of randomized, controlled trials are encouraged to follow the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials criteria.

There is insufficient evidence for the effectiveness of soft tissue surgery to stabilize the hip, due to insufficient quality of the retrospective observational studies.

...

...

The object of this systematic review was to determine whether OT interventions improve functional abilities and social participation in children with cerebral palsy.

A critical review of the studies revealed that the majority were based on a small number of subjects, and on short‐term periods in poorly controlled intervention, often without follow‐up, and some studies used inappropriate experimental designs and analysis.

The published research evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of adaptive seating in the management of children with cerebral palsy is reviewed to determine whether adaptive seating outcomes proposed in the clinical literature have been substantiated.

It was concluded that SPM training in children with cerebral palsy will be applied to combined programmes and the relationship with individual and group treatments developed.

A comprehensive evaluation of 18 studies that evaluated early occupational and/or physical therapy intervention for children with cerebral palsy revealed that as research paradigms become more rigorous, support for therapeutic intervention effectiveness decreases.

Five Kenyan children with cerebral palsy who participated in a 10-week occupational therapy intervention programme showed that four of the five children improved their ability to dress and that the children increased their time to undress significantly.

Analysis of the outcomes revealed no significant differences in hand function, quality of upper‐extremity movement, or parents' perception of hand‐function performance between the two treatment groups.

Evaluating the effects of a physical therapy program on the reaching movements of children with spastic CP found both movement time and movement units were reduced following 5 days of treatment.

The results regarding the efficacy of NDT were largely inconclusive since there were a similar number of published research studies supporting the benefit of N DT intervention as compared with no benefit, while another study was unclear as to whether or not NDT was beneficial.

The development and exploration of refinements in single-subject research methods that show promise for use in the documentation of treatment outcomes include the use of functional activity as an evaluation tool and ordinal scales for the assessment of change.

...

...