Background: Many original studies have explored the effectiveness of massage and touch on behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. However, the study design, interventions, measurements and outcomes varied among studies.
Aim: To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of massage and touch on the behavioural and psychological symptoms of older people with dementia.
Design: A quantitative systematic review and meta-analysis.
Data sources: Cochrane Library, The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Library, PubMed, CINAHL, ProQuest Health & Medical Complete, SinoMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang were searched from the date the database established to January 2016.
Review methods: Randomized, controlled trials or quasi-experimental studies, involving massage and touch intervention for older people with dementia were considered to be included. Risk of bias assessment was performed using the Cochrane Collaboration's tool and meta-analysis was performed using Revman 5.3.
Results: A total of 11 studies, involving 526 older people were included. The results of the meta-analysis showed the total score of behavioural and psychological problems with older people with dementia and subgroup scores of physical aggressive behaviour, physical non-aggressive behaviour, verbal aggressive behaviour and verbal non-aggressive behaviour decreased significantly after receiving massage or touch, while the subgroups scores of anxiety, sadness and anger did not decreased significantly.
Conclusions: Due to relatively small sample size and low quality of the included studies in this review, it is difficult to draw a conclusion on the effect of massage and touch on behavioural and psychological syndrome of dementia or implications for practice.
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia; dementia; evidence-based practice; massage; meta-analyses; non-pharmacological; nursing; systematic reviews; touch.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.