Interventional study on fatigue relief in mothers caring for hospitalized children--effect of massage incorporating techniques from oriental medicine.

The study objective was to clarify the effect of massage on mothers caring for their hospitalized children. We conducted a comparative analysis of whether palm and shoulder massage could mitigate the physical and mental exhaustion experienced by such mothers. Subjects were 68 mothers whose children were admitted to the Department of Pediatrics, Kurume University Hospital with illnesses of varying severity. Twenty mothers living in Kurume City with healthy children were used as controls. A Japanese version of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) was employed as a mental index. Deep body temperature (frontal and palmar), systolic/diastolic blood pressure and heart rate were measured as physical indices before and after massage. The POMS scores for "Tension-Anxiety (T-A)", "Depression-Dejection (D)", "Anger-Hostility (A-H)", "Fatigue (F)" and "Confusion (C)" were significantly higher, and for "Vigor (V)" were significantly lower in mothers with hospitalized children than in the control group. Systolic blood pressures were also lower than those in the control group. After massage, T-A, D, A-H, F and C scores in the mothers with hospitalized children decreased and their V scores increased significantly. However, improvement in overall POMS scores was less than in the control group. And also improvement in each of the POMS scales was less than in the control group. Moreover, T-A scores in mothers of children with cancer were significantly higher than those in mothers of children suffering from other types of diseases. Our study demonstrated that mothers with hospitalized children were much more stressed than those with healthy children. The difference in the child's illness tended to exacerbate the degree of the mothers' mental fatigue. Massage has a favorable effect on stressed mothers and may be expected to serve as a useful supporting tool.