Rehabilitation effects in patients with total hip replacement: A systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: Assess effectiveness and times of total hip replacement rehabilitation treatment through a systematic review with meta-analysis EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: Bibliographical research has been made with the following search engines: PubMed, Pedro and Cinalh. For pool analysis evaluation, it has been used the standardized mean difference (SMD). Heterogeneity between studies had been controlled through the I2 test. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: Fourteen of those studies have met the inclusion criteria. These have been divided into three different groups to assess different aspects of THR patient rehabilitation program: a rehabilitation path ' entirely made and supervised by a physiotherapist ' has been compared with an unsupervised one; an intensive rehabilitation path has been compared with a standard one and the early beginning of the treatment has been compared with a standard one. CONCLUSIONS: considering the great rise of THR surgeries, is important to minimize costs and logistic efforts for the postoperative rehabilitation program ensuring identical or better outcomes. Thinking of that and of RCTs data it seems evident that, while recognizing physiotherapist as a key element of the rehabilitation program, postoperative treatment should focus on an unsupervised rehabilitation program after a first period of a supervised intensive rehabilitation program.