Monday, January 02, 2006

Shor-Posner 2004, Methods

Shor-Posner and her team applied for and got the standard approval from the Institutional Review Board (standard for studies that involve human beings as subjects of the study), and began the study in June 2003 in the Dominican Republic.

The inclusion criteria (characteristics the children must have in order to be included in the study) were between 20 and 8 years old, confirmed HIV+ infection, being treated a an infectious disease clinic (Robert Reid Cabral Children's Hospital) in Santo Domingo, and their parent or caregiver gave signed consent. Exclusion criteria are not mentioned.

She mentions that the children were randomized to either a massage treatment group or a friendly visit control group, although she does not describe how the children were randomized.

Although the massage is referred to as a "structured protocol", they do not give details, just calling it "moderate pressure stroking and kneading of muscles, using a non-scented oil"--so, basically, effleurage and petrissage. This article is a very short review, so presumably that is why they did not go into detail on the protocol; they probably will in a longer article. Since one of the cornerstones of the scientific method is repeatability, you really should be able to repeat a study, based on the investigator's description of the protocol. Clearly, this is not enough information to do so, and so our ability to evaluate and replicate the protocol is limited.

The control group was, as often is the case for massage research, a 20-minute visit with the nurse, where they read, talked, or played games 20 minutes at a time, twice a week for 12 weeks.

The team drew blood at the start of the study to determine a baseline level of lymphocytes (including CD4/T4 and CD8/T8 cells), and again after the 12 weeks of the study to determine if any change had occurred.

They report that they performed statistical evaluations, "including comparisons between means and proportions using one-sided Student's t-test and Fisher's exact tests, with alpha level at 0.05". For our purposes, we are not going to worry about the details of what these tests mean (although if you want to get involved with carrying out massage research, you will need to know more about statistics to design a study). All that we will concern ourselves with here is the alpha level, and its relation to statistical significance. That's a topic important enough to be the subject of its own post, coming up tomorrow.

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