The effect of foot massage applied to non hodgkin lymphoma patients on pain and sleep quality related to peripheral neuropathy

This study, which was conducted on patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, aimed to evaluate the effect of foot massage on peripheral neuropathic pain and sleep quality. During the pre-survey, the study was granted ethical approval by the ethics committee and the participants. The participants who met the inclusion criteria were divided into two groups: the intervention group and the control group. The research data were collected through Questionnaire, Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), Douleur Neuropathique 4/Neuropathic Pain 4 (DN4) Questions, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Classical foot massage was applied to the participants in the intervention group, and they received three sessions a week, with each session lasting for 20 minutes (10 minutes for each foot), over a period of four weeks (12 sessions / 240 minutes). After each massage session, pain levels were again assessed using the VAS and DN4 neuropathic pain questionnaires. At the end of the fourth week, the participants' sleep quality was measured using the PSQI at pre- and post- intervention. As for the participants of the control group, they were free of any intervention. In the statistical evaluation of data, the tests Shapiro-Wilk, Student's t, Mann-Whitney's U, Wilcoxon, chi-squared, and Friedman were used. The participants in the intervention group who at pre-intervention had a pain VAS score of 3.0±2.0 and a DN4 score of 2.7±1.9, experienced a sag in their VAS score to 1.4±1.2 (p<0.05) and in their DN4 score to 1.4±1.0 (p<0.05) in the fourth week. By contrast, the participants in the control group who in the first interview marked a VAS score of 3.2±2.3 experienced a rise in their scores to 5.4±2.2 at the end of the fourth week, and those with an initial DN4 score of 3.1±2.4 experienced an increase to 6.4±2.1 (p<0.05) in the end. The participants' PSQI results demonstrated that the intervention group participants who had a PSQI score of 9.2±3.6 in the first interview felt a decrease in their score to 6.6±4.0 at the end of the fourth week while those in the control group who were initially marked 9.6±3.6 found a raise in their score to 12.3±4.1 in the end. In the light of these findings, it has been shown that foot massage intervention reduces the patients' pain levels and has a positive effect on their sleep quality. Accordingly, foot massage can be recommended to NHL patients to reduce their peripheral neuropathy-related pain and improve their sleep quality.