Degree of interest in horse-back riding therapy interventions for patients with neurocognitive disorders: a quantitative analysis of literature in online scientific databases

Introduction: Since ancient times, scholars points out effectiveness of horseback riding not only for utilitarian use, but also as form of therapy for less healthy part of society. Enlightenment age scholars started to make treaties about use of such therapy and this trend is now developing not only for physical disabilities, but also for mentally ill patients. The purpose of this study is to determine trends of interest in horseback riding therapy interventions among different groups of neurocognitive disorders among different populations of people and its comparison to prevalence of such disorders. Material and methods: Web of Science, Pubmed and Scopus databased were screened using filter with algorithm of “horseback therapy” , “horse back therapy”, ”hippotherapy” and “equine therapy”. Results were screened for appropriateness and relevance, then based on this end-filtering, papers were grouped regarding specificity of neurocognitive aspect of disorders. Results: 595 entries in Web of Science, 516 entries in Scopus and 123 results in Pubmed. Overall, 272 entries were subtracted. Conclusions: This analysis shows that most interest in such kind of therapy is focused on neurological disorders, especially with ones with cerebral palsy. There is no correlation between prevalence of selected disorders and amount of related papers.