Clinical effects of reminiscence therapy in older adults: A meta-analysis of controlled trials

Objective: Reminiscence therapy, through involving participants in recalling and sharing past events to enhance psychological wellbeing, is a popular psychosocial intervention for older adults. This paper aimed to examine the clinical effects of reminiscence therapy on the life satisfaction, happiness, depression and self-esteem of older adults aged 50 or above. Methods: Potential studies were mainly identified through the keywords: "reminiscence", "life review", "reminiscing" and "milestoning" from 12 electronic databases; and by manual search from the references and bibliographies of related papers and 14 journals. In addition, 11 mental health, ageing and geriatrics related websites were visited to capture additional studies. All pre-post test design controlled trials before 2001 comparing the life satisfaction, happiness, depression and self-esteem of older adults receiving reminiscence therapy and no treatment were included. The kind of intervention should be aligned with that defined by Haight & Burnside (1993). Data regarding study identification, study design, characteristics of subjects, and intervention and outcomes were extracted independently by two extractors, who were also responsible for quality assessment of the studies. For each outcome, the pooled standardized mean difference (SMD) in post-test between the two comparison groups was calculated. Sensitivity analysis was done to assess the robustness of the overall effects with and without including studies with non-normally distributed data. File-drawer method was used to detect possible publication bias. Results: A total of 15 studies were included for analysis. Reminiscence therapy showed significant beneficial effects on happiness (pooled SMD = 1.09; 95% CI, 0.26 to 1.92) and depression (pooled SMD=-0.90; 95% CI, -1.49 to -0.32). Conclusion: Owing to the problems of the limited number of included studies, the small sample size of the trials, the possible play of publication bias, language bias and Hawthorne effect, no convincing conclusion regarding the effects of reminiscence therapy can be drawn.