Shock wave therapy for the treatment of the patellar tendinopathy: a systematic review”,

Objective: To identify the benefits of shock wave therapy in the treatment of patellar tendinopathy through a systematic review. Materials and methods: A systematic review study, carried out from October to November 2018. In this article, it was included randomized clinical trials with adults of both sexes who have patellar tendinopathy; studies in which the main treatment was based on shock wave therapy compared to no, minimal or other interventions and studies published in scientific journals between 2013 and 2018 without language restriction. The searches were performed in the electronic databases MEDLINE, PEDro, SciELO, LILACS and BINACIS. "shock wave therapy"; "patellar tendinopathy"; "tendinopatiapatelar"; “terapiaporonda de choque"; "tendinopathy"; "tendinopathy of the lower limb" were used as search terms. The data were transcribed to a spreadsheet on the software Microsoft Excel 2016 and expressed as a table and for the evaluation of the methodological quality of the studies, the PEDro quality scale was used. Results and discussion: The search for the articles resulted in a total of 57, and 48 out of them were excluded, nine were included for full reading, .Then, five of them were excluded, one because they were non-randomized studies and two of them with elderly patients belonging to the sample, resulting in two studies for the analysis. One of these shows that, among the therapeutic extracorporeal modalities, the shock wave therapy is more effective, it reduces the pain, it increases the strength and range of the motion of athletes with patellar tendinopathy; the other article points out that invasive therapies are more effective than shock wave therapy in the treatment of tendinopathy. Conclusion: Shock wave therapy presents positive results in the treatment of patellar tendinopathy, when compared to other therapeutic extracorporeal modalities. However,the invasive therapies present better results in a short and long term. It should be observed that there is little scientific evidence on the use of shock wave therapy in biological tissue, and that most of the studies present methodological limitations.