EFFECTS OF PSYCHOMOTOR INTERVENTIONS ON PSYCHOMOTOR AND AFFECTIVE/SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS.
Psychomotor Intervention (PI); Children with Special Needs (CSN); Psychomotor Development; Affective/Social Development.
Introduction: The development of children with special needs (CSN) can be affected by a transient or permanent condition that interferes with their normal development. Depending on your disability/disorder, symptoms can vary from circumstantial, imperceptible to more compromising levels, making it difficult to acquire motor, linguistic and social skills, causing a significant impact on the progress of your physical, intellectual, emotional and social development. But being a child with special needs does not determine their developmental process. It is possible to encourage their development with stimuli and a suitable environment. For this, intervention strategies are potentially decisive. A psychomotor intervention program (PIP) conceives the possibility of working on the psychomotor development and affective/social development of a child and his/her specific needs to evolve/compensate for his/her deficiencies. Objective: To synthesize the available scientific evidence on the effects of psychomotor interventions (PI), which are the benefits and implementation possibilities for the psychomotor and affective/social development of children with special needs (CSN). Methods: This is a systematic review and meta-analysis that was reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The methodological course of construction consisted of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published from January 1970 to April 2021 in the following databases: PubMed; MEDLINE (OVID), EMBASE, LILACS and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), SCOPUS, Web of Science, Redalyc and ScienceDirect, BVS (Virtual Health Library), Google Scholar and Capes Periodicals. The study eligibility criteria were previously established according to the PICO model. The Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 (ROB2) tool was also used to assess the risk of bias. The meta-analysis was performed in Review Manager 5.4.1 (RevMan® 5.4.1). Results: 47 scientific studies were included, with participants between 06 and 450 participants, carried out in different contexts, different approaches of Psychomotor Interventions (PI) and with children with different disabilities, disorders. The sex of study participants indicated a male prevalence (64.8%). The results showed that children with disabilities are at greater risk of numerous physical and psychosocial disorders compared to children with normal development, requiring therapeutic interventions to assist in their development. A meta-analysis of 15 scientific studies out of 47 showed the effects of different approaches to psychomotor interventions (PI) on psychomotor and affective/social outcomes in children with special needs (CSN). In the analysis of the results of psychomotor interventions (PI) with a technological approach, among the variables, manual dexterity (P=0.32) and balance (P=0.70) tended to favor the intervention group when compared to the control group, but without significant statistical differences. Similar results were found in psychomotor interventions (PI) with a Sensory approach that promoted favorable changes in visual-motor integration (P=0.01) and sensory integration (P=0.27), but without statistical significance. The variable cognitive functions (P=0.003) reached more significant scores for the Sensory approach. Finally, psychomotor interventions (PI) with a Body Practice approach promoted significant changes in social responsiveness (P<0.00001) indicating improvements in affective/social development. Conclusion: The results suggest the benefits of psychomotor interventions (PI) in the development of psychomotor and affective/social outcomes in children with special needs (CSN), specifically, in cognitive functions and social responsiveness, which showed better results. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42021249292.