Researchers Find Vibrating Gloves Might help diminish pain in the hands of female patients suffering from osteoarthritis.
Researchers have explored the possibility that gloves which massage hands using slight vibration and mild compression, might have an enduring positive effect if used periodically. To investigate their theory, the researchers arbitrarily allocated 60 females with hand osteoarthritis (OA) pain either to be monitored without the vibrating gloves for three months, or to wear the vibrating gloves for 20 minutes a day.
Every participant was evaluated at baseline through questionnaires, specified their level of pain daily via a smartphone app, and were put through a short QST (quantitative sensory test) —a pain-free, non-invasive, technique that basically determines the sense and pain levels for warm and cold temperatures, as well as their sensation limit to vibration in order to help with the early detection, therapy selection, and monitoring of the progress and recovery of those suffering from pain related to various diseases (Diabetes and Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), and chronic pain).
The smartphone app prompted participants to do daily valuations of their interference of activity, pain, mood, sleep, and any apparent change. They also did written surveys at weeks six and at three months.
The researchers made likely participants wear the gloves to evaluate if they were prepared to wear them throughout the 3-month trial. Three (<5%) were not willing to take part in the trial after trying them on.
The participants were aged 62.7±7.7 on average. The intensity of pain was around 4.1±1.9 on a scale of 0-10, and they described that they had endured pain for about 11.5±9.6 years. The majority of the participants were also right-handed (88.5%) whilst half had pain mainly in the right hand.
With time, the contributors wore the vibrating gloves more infrequently — around 5.2 days per week. When those in the experimental group were evaluated against the control group they had less intense pain (P <.05). They did not experience changes in sleep or mood. Individuals with higher QST sensitivity were helped the most by wearing these gloves (P <.05).
The study was presented at the American Pain Society’s 36th Annual Scientific Meeting last year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
this is a compelling argument you got there!|