Do orthotics work as an injury prevention strategy for the military? A systematic review

摘要

Army recruits have a high prevalence of lower-limb injury during their initial military training and it has been suggested that the prevalence of lower-limb injuries in military recruits and infantry soldiers is comparable or even higher than that of endurance athletes. Sixty to 80% of these injuries are overuse lower-extremity injuries. Hauret et al. reviewed injuries statistics of 2006 in the USA and noticed that 743 547 injury-related musculoskeletal conditions were treated in active duty members of the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy. Thirty-five per cent of these were overuse injuries of the lower extremities, and stress fracture constituted 2% of the injuries. In view of these data, numerous intervention strategies for preventing military injuries have been suggested in the literature. However, the findings are unequivocal. Therefore, the authors in this literature review have to be applauded for collating relevant studies to evaluate the effectiveness of orthotic devices as an injury prevention strategy for the military. The findings indicated that orthotic devices had no protective effect for overuse injuries of the lower limb and the back. These results are essentially similar to our two systematic reviews conducted 10 years apart that aimed to assess the effects of interventions for preventing lower limb soft-tissue running injuries. Our recent review included 25 randomized or quasi-randomized controlled trials (30 252 participants). Among them, 19 trials were from military recruits (28 941 participants). We identified two trials that investigated the effect of heel pad insole and custom-made shock-absorbing