Article

There are a wide variety of ankle foot orthoses used in clinical
practice which are characterised by their design, the material used and the
stiffness of that material. Changing any of these three components will alter the
effect of the ankle foot orthosis on gait. The purpose of this
article is to provide an overview on the available research on ankle foot
orthosis-footwear combination tuning on the gait characteristics of children with
cerebral palsy through a structured review. METHODS: A thorough search of previous studies published in English was conducted
within all major databases using relevant phrases without any limits for the
dates. These searches were then supplemented by tracking all key references from
the appropriate articles identified including hand searching of published books
where relevant. RESULTS: To date, there are 947 papers in the literature
pertaining to the study of ankle foot orthosis. Of these, 153 investigated the
use of ankle foot orthosis for children with cerebral palsy. All the studies
included in this review were of a within-subjects design and the evidence levels
were generally low. CONCLUSIONS: The overall results suggested that ankle foot
orthosis-footwear combination tuning has the potential to improve the kinematics
and kinetics of gait in children with cerebral palsy. However, the review
highlights a lack of well-designed and adequately powered studies. Clinical
relevance While the research described in this article indicates an improvement
in the gait of children with cerebral palsy following tuning of their ankle foot
orthosis-footwear combination, there is still a paucity of research with
quantitative data on the effects of kinematics and kinetics of ankle foot
orthosis-footwear combination tuning, comparing untuned ankle foot
orthosis-footwear combinations with tuned ankle foot orthosis-footwear
combination. Furthermore, current research does not identify the effect of tuning
on energy efficiency.

Langue : ANGLAIS