Effectiveness of treadmill training on gait function in children with cerebral palsy: Meta-analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this review was to analysis the effects of treadmill train-ing on gait function in children with cerebral palsy. Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Central Regis-ter of Controlled Trials, Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), PubMed and Web of Science were searched. Investigating the effects of treadmill training on gait endurance, gait speed, limb support time, cadence, and step length in children with cerebral palsy. Similar out-comes were pooled by calculating the standardized mean difference. Of the eight studies, 179 participants were included. The average PEDro score was 6.25/10. The results of the sensitivity test for bias evaluation using the duval and tweedie's trim and fill method showed low publica-tion bias. The test regarding the effect of treadmill training on overall gait function yielded a moderate effect size of 0.53, which was a statisti-cally significant effect as its confidence interval did not include. The overall effect size of gait endurance was 0.85. The overall effect size of gait speed and limb support time were 0.52 and 0.73. The overall effect size of cadence and step length were 0.14 and 0.21, indicating a nonsig-nificant improvement. These findings suggested that treadmill training on cerebral palsy was effective for gait endurance, gait speed and limb support time than cadence and step length.