Background: The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of various results of treadmill training in children and adults with Down syndrome (DS).
Methods: To provide an overview of this effectiveness, we conducted a systematic literature review of studies in which participants with DS from all age groups received treadmill training, alone or combined with physiotherapy. We also looked for comparisons with control groups of patients with DS who did not undergo treadmill training. The search was performed in medical databases: PubMed, PEDro, Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science, and included trials published until February 2023. Following PRISMA criteria, the risk of bias assessment was conducted using a tool developed by the Cochrane Collaboration for RCT. The selected studies presented multiple outcomes with differences in methodology; therefore, we were not able to conduct any sort of data synthesis, so we present measures of treatment effect as mean differences and corresponding 95% confidence intervals.
Results: We selected 25 studies for the analysis with a total number of 687 participants, and identified 25 different outcomes which are presented in a narrative manner. In all outcomes we observed positive results favoring the treadmill training.
Discussion: Introducing treadmill exercise into typical physiotherapy generates improvement in mental and physical health of people with DS.
Keywords: Down syndrome; intellectual disability; physiotherapy; treadmill training.