Table II.
Physiotherapy compared to no active treatment for tennis elbow.
| Certainty assessment |
Number of patients |
Effect |
Certainty | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of studies | Study design | Risk of bias | Inconsistency | Indirectness | Imprecision | Other considerations | Physiotherapy | No active treatment | Relative (95% CI) | Absolute (95% CI) | |
| Pain (scale from: 0 to 10) | |||||||||||
| 5 | randomised trials | serious∗,† | serious‡ | not serious | not serious | None | 212 | 235⊕ | - | MD 0.07 VAS lower (0.56 lower to 0.41 higher) | ⊕⊕◯◯ Low |
| Function | |||||||||||
| 5 | randomised trials | serious∗,† | not serious | not serious | not serious | None | 212 | 235 | - | SMD 0.13 SD higher (0.06 lower to 0.32 higher) | ⊕⊕⊕◯ Moderate |
CI, confidence interval; MD, mean difference; VAS, visual analog scale; SMD, standardized mean difference.
∗
treatment allocation was not concealed.
†
Blinding of participants did not occur in any study.
‡
I2 = 61% in this comparison.