Ultrasound therapy for pain reduction in musculoskeletal disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Guan H, Wu Y, Wang X, Liu B, Yan T, Abedi-Firouzjah R · Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease

Ultrasound beat the comparator across the five knee trials (I2 51%, Z 2.65, p 0.008) and neither ultrasound nor the comparator worked for shoulder disorders (I2 93%, Z 0.73, p 0.46). The paper reports its pooled results as heterogeneity, Z and p only: no effect size, no confidence interval, no scale, for any comparison.

Population

Ten trials of knee and shoulder musculoskeletal disorders published 2010 to 2023, seven of them osteoarthritis; only seven trials, five of them knee, survived into the pooled analysis

Intervention

Ultrasound therapy as the primary treatment rather than as an add-on

Comparator

Other physical interventions

Limitations

A meta-analysis that never states a pooled effect size or confidence interval, so nothing in it can be compared with any other pooling of the same literature or converted to a scale a reader knows. Three of the ten included trials were dropped because their results could not be extracted. The knee subgroup rests on five trials. The authors report no financial support and no conflict of interest.