Climate therapy
Structured summary
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Key message
The Norwegian Knowledge Center was commissioned by the The Secretariat to the National Council for Priority Setting in Health Care to perform a systematic literature search. The aim was to identify randomized controlled trials examining the effect of climate therapy. We were to include travel to warmer climate as well as travel to altitude; we included people of all ages and diagnoses.
Methods
We developed and performed systematic searches in the databases Embase and Medline Ovid, PubMed, Cochrane Library, ISI and CRD (DARE and HTA) for randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews. The search was performed in October 2012. Both authors screened the identified references for relevance in accordance with the inclusion criteria.
Results
We identified 2899 unique references. From these, 69 were considered potentially relevant and read in full text. 17 randomized controlled trials were included, they involve the following diagnoses:
- Rheumatology
- Fibromyalgia
- Neuromuscular diseases
- Dermatological diseases
- Respiratory diseases
The following comparisons were included:
- Travel to warm climate with treatment compared to travel to warm climate without treatment
- Travel to altitude with treatment compared to travel to altitude without treatment
- Travel to warm climate with treatment compared to treatment without travel
- Travel to warm climate with treatment compared to treatment as usual or no intervention