Effect of neuromobilization techniques on the symptoms of patients with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: A systematic review of the literature

NeuroMobilization is one of the recent nonsurgical treatments for patients with carpal tunnel syndrome with a lot of discrepancies regarding its efficacy. The aim of the present study was a systematic review of the previous studies about effectiveness of neural gliding techniques for carpal tunnel syndrome patients.
Using the keywords Carpal tunnel syndrome, Median nerve, NeuroMobilization, and physiotherapy, a literature search was performed for the period 1998-2015, in Google Scholar, PEDRO, PubMed, and Science Direct databases.
Among the articles found, only the ones that had control groups and used neural gliding techniques were chosen. Therefore, out of 20 articles, nine were selected according to the inclusion criteria.
Although pain reduction, function and sensing improvement, and ability enhancement were noticed in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome, after applying neural gliding techniques in some studies, the efficacy was not clear and definite due to weak results in some other studies. Also, more comprehensive researches are needed with more study cases and longer follow-up time to resolve these discrepancies.