Swedish massage and abnormal reflexes of children with spastic cerebral palsy

Massage therapy is one of the most widely used complementary and alternative medicine therapies for children. This study was conducted to determine the effect of wedish massage on abnormal reflexes in children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP).
This study was a single blind clinical trial conducted on forty children with spastic CP who were recruited from clinics of the University of Social Welfare & Rehabilitation Sciences.
They were randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. The routine occupational therapy (OT) techniques were performed during a 3 month-period in both groups. The intervention group also received Swedish massage for 30 minutes before every OT session. Primary, spinal, brain stem, midbrain, cortical
and automatic reflexes were evaluated at the beginning of the study and 3 months later. The data analysis was done by parametric and nonparametric tests.
0.05).
Adding Swedish massage to traditional OT techniques had no significant effects on abnormalreflexes in children with spastic cerebral palsy. Evidently more research is required in order to completely reject the effects of Swedish massage on abnormal reflexes of children with CP.