Objective: Anorexia is the long-term decreased sensation of appetite. Besides the pharmacotherapy, in China, massage therapy is also used by many traditional Chinese medicine physicians to treat anorexia in children. This paper conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy of massage therapy for the treatment of anorexia in children. Methods: Seven databases were used in our research as follows: Cochrane Library, Web of Science, PubMed, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Scientific Journal Database (VIP), and the Wan-fang Database. Search terms were as follows: (Massage OR tuina OR manipulation) AND (infant OR baby OR child OR pediatrics) AND (anorexia OR anorexias OR anorexia nervosas) AND (randomized controlled trial [RCTs]). Results: A total of 30 studies, including 2991 patients (1545 in the intervention group and 1446 in the control group), were included in this meta-analysis. The results showed that the relative risk was 1.31 regarding clinical effective rate with 95% confidence intervals from 1.24 to 1.38. Conclusions: Massage therapy was significantly better than pharmacotherapy in treating anorexia in children. However, the quality of evidence for this finding was low due to high risk of bias of the included studies. Thus, well-designed RCTs are still needed to further evaluate the efficacy of massage therapy.
