Background: At a time of innovative medical technologies development, it is paramount that medical services be evaluated with regard to their effectiveness. Research in physical medicine and rehabilitation, as well as the specialty itself, is relatively young; however, the number of publications in the field has recently been increasing. The main aim of this article is to evaluate the effectiveness of cryotherapy, including local cryostimulation, after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.
Material and methods: The present paper reviews scientific publications extracted from the Medline Embase, Cochra-ne Library, and PEDro databases according to a pre-designed search strategy. The review analysed publications where the authors indicated cryotherapy as an intervention in patients after ACL reconstruction and the study endpoints referred to analgesic or anti-oedema effects.
Results: As a result of selection, 16 publications were chosen for the analysis, including 1 meta-analysis, 2 systematic reviews and 13 RCTs. Only the results of randomised studies are presented. Endpoints referring to analgesic effects were present in all of the studies in the analysis, while endpoints referring to anti-oedema effects were present in five studies. Statistically significant results constituted 62% of the results for analgesic effects and 60% for anti-oedema effects.
Conclusions: 1. The currently limited evidence from randomised studies is not sufficient to draw final conclusions on the effectiveness of cryotherapy in patients after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. 2. It seems that cryotherapy can serve as an adjunct analgesic treatment in the early period after arthroscopic ACL reconstruction, while there is no notable improvement in patients after this procedure in reducing oedema.
Keywords: anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction; cryostimulation; cryotherapy; treatment outcome.