• Cochrane Db Syst Rev · Oct 2007

    Review

    Hypnotherapy for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome.

    • A N Webb, R H Kukuruzovic, A G Catto-Smith, and S M Sawyer.
    • Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, Gastroenterology, Flemington Road, Parkville Victoria 3052, Melbourne, Australia. annette.webb@rch.org.au
    • Cochrane Db Syst Rev. 2007 Oct 17 (4): CD005110.

    BackgroundIrritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common functional gastrointestinal disorder of unknown aetiology. Current pharmacological treatments have limited value. Hypnotherapy has been reported to have beneficial effects for IBS symptoms.ObjectivesTo evaluate the efficacy of hypnotherapy for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome.Search StrategyPublished and unpublished randomised clinical trials and quasi-randomised clinical trials were identified through structured searches of MEDLINE (1966 to March 2006), EMBASE (1980 to March 2006), PsycINFO (1806 to March 2006), CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, 1982 to March 2006), AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, 1985 to March 2006) and The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled trials. Conference proceedings from Digestive Disease Week (1980 to 2005) were also searched.Selection CriteriaEligible studies included all randomised and quasi-randomised clinical studies comparing hypnotherapy for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome with no treatment or another therapeutic intervention.Data Collection And AnalysisAll studies were evaluated for eligibility for inclusion. Included studies were assessed for quality and data were extracted independently by four authors. The primary outcome measure of interest was the overall bowel symptom severity score which combines abdominal pain, diarrhoea or constipation and bloating. Secondary outcomes included abdominal pain, diarrhoea, constipation, bloating, quality of life, patient's overall assessment of well-being, psychological measures as per validated questionnaires, and adverse events.Main ResultsFour studies including a total of 147 patients met the inclusion criteria. Only one study compared hypnotherapy to an alternative therapy (psychotherapy and placebo pill), two studies compared hypnotherapy with waiting-list controls and the final study compared hypnotherapy to usual medical management. Data were not pooled for meta-analysis due to differences in outcome measures and study design. The therapeutic effect of hypnotherapy was found to be superior to that of a waiting list control or usual medical management, for abdominal pain and composite primary IBS symptoms, in the short term in patients who fail standard medical therapy. Harmful side-effects were not reported in any of the trials. However, the results of these studies should be interpreted with caution due to poor methodological quality and small size.Authors' ConclusionsThe quality of the included trials was inadequate to allow any conclusion about the efficacy of hypnotherapy for irritable bowel syndrome. More research with high quality trials is needed.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,704,841 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.