What evidence is there that occupational therapy is an effective intervention for SPD?
The American Journal of Occupational Therapy in March-April 2007 published the first research study ever to evaluate the outcome of occupational therapy with a sensory integration approach (OT-SI) that met all four criteria of a randomized control trial (RCT). This study was the culmination of 10 years of research by the SPD Foundation and addressed the limitations of the estimated 80 previous studies of treatment effectiveness by (1) using a homogeneous sample, (2) manualizing treatment, (3) including outcome measures that were shown previously to be sensitive to change from OT-SI, and (4) using randomized treatment groups and blinded evaluators. All p values are p. The findings were that children in the OT-SI group made gains that were significantly greater than the children in the other two groups (No Treatment and Activity Protocol, a placebo treatment) on Goal Attainment Scaling (p < 0.001). The OT-SI group also increased significantly more than the other groups on Attention (p =
