Effects of wearing ankle weight on knee joint repositioning sense in the elderly.
Sooyoung Kim, Daeun Jung, Jintae Han and 1 others
PMID 27799664WHAT IT FOUND
Ankle weights did not show a reliable improvement in knee position sense in older adults in this small study.
Older adults still made larger angle errors than younger adults.
Key findings
01Ankle weights did not produce a statistically significant reduction in knee repositioning error compared with no weight.
02Older participants had higher knee repositioning error than younger participants under all ankle weight conditions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
The sample was small, and the authors list small sample size and possible measurement error as limitations. The methods and table give different group counts: methods say young n=10 and elderly n=11, while the table says young n=11 and elderly n=10. The paper describes ankle weights as percentages in methods but reports them in kilograms in the table. Participants were excluded for recent injury, neurological disorders, knee surgery, or serious degenerative knee disease, so results may not apply to more impaired older adults. The discussion states that ankle weights can improve positioning sense in elderly individuals, but the weight effect was not statistically significant.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that ankle weights improve knee position sense in older adults. The weight effect was not statistically significant. The clearer finding was that older adults had higher error than younger adults.