This review aimed to summarise the current evidence of the effects of Kinesio Taping in people with musculoskeletal conditions. Ten of the included randomised trials estimated the effect of Kinesio Taping by comparing it to sham taping or no intervention, or by comparing its effect when added to other interventions. In general, Kinesio Taping either provided no significant benefit, or its effect was too small to be clinically worthwhile. Two trials
did find a significant benefit from Kinesio Taping where the confidence interval was wide enough to include some clinically worthwhile effects, but these trials were of low quality. The effect of Kinesio Taping was also compared to the effects of other physiotherapy interventions
in four trials. The only one of these trials to identify a significant benefit was again of low quality. On DAPT purchase average, the trials identified in this review were small with moderate methodological quality. Despite several benefits of registering a clinical trial,29 and 30 only one out of the twelve trials was registered.3 www.selleckchem.com/products/cb-839.html Out of the twelve trials, three provided transparent information on sample size calculation,3, 5 and 13 one provided information about primary outcomes3 and none stated that their trial received funding. The quality of evidence (GRADE) for all comparisons ranged from low to very low quality, which means that further robust and low risk of bias evidence is likely to change for the estimates of the effects of this intervention. This systematic review used a highly sensitive
search strategy to identify trials in all major databases, following the recommendations from the Cochrane Collaboration.28 Searches were also supplemented by the identification of potential eligible studies from hand searching as well as from clinical trials registers. Therefore, the searches comprehensively identified most or all of the current high-quality evidence about Kinesio Taping in people with musculoskeletal conditions. However, it is possible that some trials might have been published in local databases and as a consequence were not included in this review. One strength of this review compared to previous reviews is a larger number of relevant clinical trials in participants with musculoskeletal conditions. However, the conclusions from all previous reviews (including this one) are very similar.6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 These findings confirm that this intervention cannot be considered to be effective for this population. In the present review only patient-centred outcomes were described, because these outcomes are the ones that are considered to be the most important in clinical practice for both clinicians and patients. The included trials compared Kinesio Taping with a large range of other modalities (ie, no treatment, sham taping, exercises, manual therapy and electrotherapy).