New and Updated Cochrane Systematic Reviews
Therapeutic exercises for affecting post-treatment swallowing in people treated for advanced-stage head and neck cancers
Authors' conclusions: We found no evidence that undertaking therapeutic exercises before, during and/or immediately after HNC treatment leads to improvement in oral swallowing. This absence of evidence may be due to the small participant numbers in trials, resulting in insufficient power to detect any difference. Data from the identified trials could not be combined due to differences in the choice of primary outcomes and in the measurement tools used to assess them, and the differing baseline and endpoints across studies.
Designing and implementing studies with stronger methodological rigour is essential. There needs to be agreement about the key primary outcomes, the choice of validated assessment tools to measure them and the time points at which those measurements are made.
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