Children’s neurological diseases are complex. Common clinical diseases include autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, etc. The rehabilitation methods in China mainly start with children’s language and cognition. Animal-assisted intervention is a kind of psychosocial intervention, including animal assisted therapy, animal assisted education or animal assisted activities under specific conditions. With its popularity in the world, this field is rapidly approaching a paradigm shift and can be used as a new supplementary and alternative treatment for children’s neurological diseases. By analyzing the literature on animal-assisted intervention and research on children’s neurological diseases, this paper summarizes the application methods and effects of various types of animals in clinical practice, aiming to provide new intervention methods with scientific theoretical basis for the rehabilitation of children with neurological diseases in China and promote the further development of rehabilitation in China.
Objective To explore the intervention effect of music therapy on children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods The China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, Chongqing VIP, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library were searched by computer to comprehensively collect randomized controlled trials on the intervention effect of music therapy on children with autism spectrum disorder. The search period was from the establishment of the database to December 31, 2022. RevMan 5.4 software was used for meta-analysis. Results Finally, 20 articles were included, including 913 cases in the music therapy group and 811 cases in the control group, with a total sample size of 1724 cases. The meta-analysis results showed that the overall treatment effect [standardized mean difference (SMD)=−0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) (−1.12, −0.78)], the treatment effect of language [SMD=−0.71, 95%CI (−0.84, −0.57)], behavior [SMD=−0.65, 95%CI (−0.78, −0.52)], social interaction [SMD=−0.52, 95%CI (−0.63, −0.40)], cognition [SMD=1.37, 95%CI (1.00, 1.74)] and sensory perception [SMD=−0.89, 95%CI (−1.03, −0.74)] of the music therapy group were better than those of the control group (P<0.05). Conclusion The existing data show that music therapy applied to children with autism spectrum disorder can effectively improve their language, behavior, social interaction, cognition, and sensory perception, thereby having a positive impact on the overall treatment effect of children. However, due to the limitations of the number and quality of included studies, more high-quality studies are needed to verify.