Therapeutic knee taping in patients with knee osteoarthritis: effect on knee joint kinematics, kinetics and knee pain during walking gait

Background: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most debilitating and prevalent diseases associated with aging, and is estimated to affect 9% of men and 18% of women over 65 years of age (Davis et al., 1991). Knee OA affects the condylar surfaces of the joint and its associated structures (bone, cartilage, ligaments, and fat pad) and if left untreated generally leads to the slow and painful degeneration of the joint and surrounding structures. Knee OA remains one of the few chronic diseases of aging with few effective, non-invasive treatments. This study will be the first of its kind to investigate the effect of therapeutic taping techniques on knee pain, as well as the kinematics and kinetics of the knee and lower limb during walking gait. Methodology: Fifteen participants (10 male, 5 female) with radiographic diagnosed knee osteoarthritis (OA) were recruited for this study (Types II and III). Participants had three taping conditions (no tape, sham tape, therapeutic tape) applied in a randomised, counter-balanced design. During each tape condition, each participant was required to complete several tasks of daily living. Spatiotemporal, knee pain, knee and lower limb kinetic and kinematic variables were measured during the straight line walking gait task. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA, with a Sidak post hoc comparison was used to compare differences in dependent variables between the three taping groups (α = 0.05). Results: All participants were shown to have low function and quality of life from the KOOS questionnaire administered prior to the testing (57.0 ± 9.5. Therapeutic knee taping was shown to significantly reduce the self-reported levels of pain during activities of daily living (p = 0.017). No other differences were observed between the taping groups for the spatiotemporal, kinematic and kinetic variables. Conclusion: Therapeutic knee taping was shown to reduce knee pain during activities of daily living which could improve knee related quality of life. There were no acute changes in knee spatiotemporal, knee kinetic or knee kinematic variables following therapeutic knee taping. Future research should be directed at the effect of prolonged periods of therapeutic knee taping and walking gait biomechanics; however, the results of this study are only relevant to the acute use of therapeutic knee taping.