A scoping review of self-management interventions for adults with multiple sclerosis

The purpose of this scoping review is to identify self-management tasks and skills that are being taught in existing interventions for persons with multiple sclerosis and to describe intervention strategies used to facilitate the learning of self-management tasks and skills. Multiple strategies were used to search for studies published or in press between 1980 and 2008 that evaluated self-management interventions. The main exclusion criteria were case studies, inadequate description of the intervention, and traditional clinical patient education interventions. Two independent coders categorized the interventions by using Lorig and Holman's self-management framework and Abraham and Michie's taxonomy of behavior change techniques. Twenty-seven interventions were identified from 34 articles. Common intervention topics included fatigue management (n = 12), coping, depression, and stress management (n = 10), and medication management (n = 6). Also, no 2 interventions used the same delivery format to implement the same combination of intervention strategies. Furthermore, markedly different intervention strategies were used to improve the same outcomes. These results highlight a need to systematically test intervention strategies one at a time, or in a clear specified combination, as well as compare existing interventions to determine which are most effective in supporting persons with multiple sclerosis to learn and incorporate self-management tasks and skills.