TENS added nothing to exercise therapy for knee osteoarthritis

The edition in brief

A Brazilian sham-controlled trial randomised 96 people with knee osteoarthritis doing structured exercise to active or sham high-frequency TENS. KOOS pain differed by about one point after treatment (95% CI −5.2 to 7.3), well short of the 10-point minimal important difference, with no secondary benefit. A French cohort of 581 hamstring ACL reconstructions followed at least six years found each degree of posterior tibial slope raised rerupture odds by about 28% at every age, but absolute risk depended heavily on age: with a 15-degree slope, predicted rerupture was 36.6% at 18 and 3.9% at 45. A US cohort of 243 hip arthroscopies for femoroacetabular impingement found failure at ten years in 23.3% of patients with psychiatric comorbidity versus 5.3% without, an association that argues for screening and counselling rather than exclusion. A French registry of 489 ACL reconstructions found non-hamstring grafts linked to better IKDC scores overall, with no evidence that a concomitant MCL injury changed that. The pearl covers established measures for preventing periprosthetic joint infection.