The effectiveness of massage with and without dimethyl sulfoxide in preventing pressure ulcers: a randomized, double-blind cross-over trial in patients prone to pressure ulcers

What Was Tested

Researchers studied DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

A randomized, double-blind cross-over design, in which patients of nursing homes who are prone to PU underwent two of the three possible interventions; 'position changes only', 'massaging with an indifferent cream' and 'massaging with a dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) cream'.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and crossover study.

Because people in this DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent).

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent) and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Dermatologic Agents, Dimethyl Sulfoxide, Free Radical Scavengers, Kaplan-Meier Estimate, Logistic Models, Massage and Netherlands.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and crossover study of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent).

Results are reported in around 2 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2007 (International journal of nursing studies), a journal based in England.

More context: the DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, non-peptide solvent) compound page, all human trials.