Clinical trial related to rehabilitation of patients with Alzheimer:

cross sectional study

Abstract

Introduction. Alzheimer's is a degenerative and progressive neurological disease, with a prevalence about 60 to 70% of diagnosed dementia cases. Objective. To describe the main characteristics of physiotherapy clinical trials related to the rehabilitation of Alzheimer disease’s (AD) patients, published in the PEDro database; to rank, by the impact factor, the main journals that publish studies in this area; and to analyze the correlation between methodological quality, impact factor and time of publication. Method. The PEDro database search selected all clinical trials, aimed at rehabilitation of AD patients, extracting the following data language, year and time of publication, methodological quality, sample size, intervention, comparison, and impactor factor from all journals. Spearman's correlation coefficient was calculated to explore the relationships between the variables. Results. We found 93 studies published in 58 journals. The mean number of participants per study was 102±155 subjects, most of them published in the English language (97%). The mean PEDro score of the studies was 5.5±1.5. General exercises were the main type of treatment used (43%), compared to another type of intervention (41%). The mean impact factor of the journals was 6.7±11.6. No significant correlation was found between any of the variables. Conclusion. The trials related to the rehabilitation of AD patients shoed, in general, moderate methodological quality. Studies are mostly published in journals with high impact factor (mean of 6.7). Finally, both current and older studies, may have good methodological quality, regardless of the impact factor of the journal.