Pain Exposure Physical Therapy (PEPT) in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type 1: A Systematic Review

Complex regional pain syndrome type 1 (CRPS-1) is a debilitating and progressive pathology in which chronic symptoms affect the functional capacity, and there are discussions about its best form of intervention. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of pain exposure physical therapy (PEPT) on functional recovery of these patients and to compare with conventional treatment. Systematized bibliographic searches were performed with qualitative and quantitative exploratory objective of scientific articles of the last 10 years in the databases PubMed, EBSCO and PEDro. Three studies were selected to analyze: Ek et al. (2009) conducted evaluations at baseline and 3 months after the last session, with 106 patients. The evaluations by Meent et al.‘s paper (2011) realized pre-treatment and 12 months after last session, with 20 patients. In Barnhoorn et al.‘s article (2015) the only one to perform controlled and randomized study with 56 patients divided into PEPT and conventional, and evaluations were pre-treatment, 3, 6, and 9 months after the last session; performed 5 treatment sessions of 40 minutes, as well as in the other studies. There were positive and significant outcomes on the intervention of PEPT in CRPS-1, showing that this treatment is effective in functional recovery of these patients.