NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Gentle massage therapy shows some promise for easing dementia patients' agitation and anxiety, though there have been too few well-conducted studies to recommend the treatment yet, according to researchers. In a review of two clinical trials, Danish researchers found that hand massage helped calm dementia patients' agitation levels, while gentle touch and "verbal encouragement" at mealtime improved their food intake.

The findings suggest that human touch could help allay the agitation, anxiety and other behavioral and emotional problems that come with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

However, so few well-designed studies have looked into the question that it's hard to draw conclusions for now, according to Dr. Niels Viggo Hansen, a researcher at the Knowledge and Research Center for Alternative Medicine, which is part of Denmark's Ministry of Health.

Indeed, Hansen told Reuters Health that he and his colleagues were disappointed to find only two clinical trials of high enough quality to include in their review.

Their findings appear in the Cochrane Library, a publication of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research.

The behavioral and emotional effects of dementia -- including wandering, difficulty with eating and bathing, anxiety, confusion and agitation -- are challenging for caregivers, and there is growing interest in whether therapeutic touch can bring some short-term relief from these problems.

The two studies Hansen and his colleagues reviewed included a total of 110 nursing home residents with dementia. In one study, researchers used gentle touch and verbal encouragement to help residents stay calm at mealtime. They found that those who received actual contact ate more than residents who received verbal encouragement alone.

In the second study, researchers found that hand massage, with or without calming music, helped soothe dementia patients' agitation levels for a short period.

What's needed now are larger, longer-term studies with more rigorous designs, Hansen said. This, he noted, includes giving a precise description of the touch therapies being used, so that the findings can be "useful and repeatable elsewhere."

In general, there is reason to believe that massage and other forms of touch could prove helpful for dementia patients, according to Hansen. On the physiological level, touch could affect the release of hormones that regulate anxiety and agitation, for example.

Then there's the "commonsense psychological level," Hansen noted. Physical contact, he explained, is a basic form of human communication that often gets lost once people are mature enough to use words instead.

But for people with dementia, Hansen said, human touch may again become the easiest way, or even the only way, to communicate.