Knee bracing: effects of proprioception

To examine the effects of a knee sleeve type brace on the proprioceptive ability of subjects with normal knees during a dynamic tracking task.

A 2 X 2 Latin square cross over design; in each Latin square, subjects were matched for age and gender.

An institution focused on clinical education.

Twenty subjects with no musculoskeletal or neurological conditions.

Each subject performed a tracking task on a Kin-Com dynamometer. Angle and force data from the Kin-Com and angle data from an electrogoniometer were sampled at 100Hz using a data acquisition program on a PC computer. The subjects were blindfolded and the limb attached to the Kin-Com was moved passively by the dynamometer. Subjects were instructed to follow the movement as closely as possible with the other limb (the tracking limb). Subject performed two trials, one without knee bracing and another that involved the application of a brace to the tracking limb.

The magnitude of the error in tracking was established by taking the difference of the active and passively moving limbs and calculating the root mean square (RMS) of the difference.

The findings showed that there was an improvement of 11% in tracking when subjects wore the knee brace (p < .05).

Alterations in proprioception as a result of bracing may be partly responsible for the improvement in knee injury statistics reported in some studies.