Table 5.
Methodological quality of included studies according to the “Quality Assessment Tool for Before-After (Pre-post)”.
| Studies made on healthy volunteers | Study made on stroke population | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cogiamanian et al. (38) | Schabrun et al. (33) | Kang et al. (39) | Rocchi et al. (40) | Tashiro et al. (15) | |
| 1. Was the study question or objective clearly stated? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2. Were eligibility/selection criteria for the study population prespecified and clearly described? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 3. Were the participants in the study representative of those who would be eligible for the test/service/intervention in the | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| general or clinical population of interest? | |||||
| 4. Were all eligible participants that met the prespecified entry criteria enrolled? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 5. Was the sample size sufficiently large to provide confidence in the findings? | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| 6. Was the test/service/intervention clearly described and delivered consistently across the study population? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 7. Were the outcome measures prespecified, clearly defined, valid, reliable, and assessed consistently across all study | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| participants? | |||||
| 8. Were the people assessing the outcomes blinded to the participants' exposures/interventions? | Yes | Not reported | Not reported | Not reported | Yes |
| 9. Was the loss to follow-up after baseline 20% or less? Were those lost to follow-up accounted for in the analysis? | Yes | Not reported | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 10. Did the statistical methods examine changes in outcome measures from before to after the intervention? Were statistical tests were done that provided p-values for the | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| pre-to-post changes? | |||||
| 11. Were outcome measures of interest taken multiple times before the intervention and multiple times after the intervention (i.e., did they use an interrupted time-series | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| design)? | |||||
| 12. If the intervention was conducted at a group level (e.g., a whole hospital, a community, etc.) did the statistical analysis take into account the use of individual-level data to | No | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| determine effects at the group level? | |||||
| Quality rating | Fair | Fair | Poor | Fair | Good |