Immediate Effects of Different Electrotherapy Modalities on Pain and Temperature Control in Individuals with Knee Osteoarthritis
Knee osteoarthritis; electrical stimulation; electrotherapy
Introduction: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is recognized as the leading cause of pain and motor dysfunction in the musculoskeletal system worldwide. Electrotherapy through neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), despite possessing a reasonable level of evidence, has not been deemed suitable for treating OA-related pain due to inconsistent results and controversial effects. Objectives: The study aimed to investigate the effects of applying NMES to knee OA patients during a single treatment session, as well as potential discrepancies in the effects of interferential currents (IF), Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), and Australian current (AUSSIE). Methods: A randomized cross-sectional clinical trial was conducted, wherein 100 individuals were selected and randomly allocated into four groups: TENS (G1), Interferential Current (IF) (G2), Australian current (G3), and a placebo group (G4). Assessment tools included thermography, the Numeric Verbal Rating Scale (NVRS), and the painful arc test. Levene's test was applied to verify the homogeneity of dependent variables. Once these assumptions were met, a mixed-design ANOVA (Split-Splot) was employed to identify significant differences among the obtained measurements, followed by Bonferroni post hoc tests for all assessed time points and between all groups. The significance level for all tests was set at 5%, and statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS (version 18.0). Results: No significant differences were observed among the results of the different modalities analyzed in this study.