Home-based therapy for upper limb activity in children and adolescents with unilateral cerebral palsy: systematic review and meta-analysis

PURPOSE: To analyze the effect of home-based therapy for upper limb activity in children and adolescents with unilateral cerebral palsy. METHODS: PubMed, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and PEDro were systematically searched from inception to March 2026 for experimental studies addressing the effect of home-based therapies in participants aged from 2 to 18 years old. The DerSimonian and Laird method was used to compute pooled estimates of the standardized mean differences (SMD) and their respective 95% confidence intervals (CI). Subgroup analyses were performed based on the dosage of interventions. RESULTS: > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: High-intensity home-based therapies have demonstrated promising findings in improving upper limb activity in children and adolescents with unilateral cerebral palsy. Further high-quality studies may assess the influence of intervention characteristics.