Reduce Pain and Improve Quality of Life in Patient With Knee Osteoarthritis by Light, Sound and Brain Stimulation

Patients affected with osteoarthritis knee have associated with pain and inflammation of the joint capsule, impaired muscular stabilization, decrease range of motion and functional disability. Laser therapy, phonophoresis, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and conventional physiotherapy exercises has innumerable benefits to the patients with knee osteoarthritis (KOA).However, it is still not clear which treatment is effective among them in rehabilitating the patients with chronic knee osteoarthritis (KOA). Aim is to establish the benefits of High intensity Laser therapy, phonophoresis, tDCS and conventional physiotherapy in the treatment of patient with chronic KOA living in the hilly terrain. A total of 160 patients with chronic KOA will be recruited by the simple random sampling (random number generator) to participate in randomized, double blind randomized controlled, study. Recruited patients with chronic KOA will be randomly divided into four groups, high intensity-laser therapy (HILT) group, ibuprofen gel phonophoresis (IGP) group, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) group and conventional physiotherapy (CPT) group. Duration of the treatment will be 8 minutes in one session/knee joint for HILT and IGP and 30 minutes in one session for tDCS each day for 3 days/week for 8 weeks. Thus, each patient with chronic KOA will receive 24 sessions in total. The Western Ontario and Mc Master Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), Digitalized pain pressure algometer (ALGO-DS-01) and 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) questionnaire are the outcome measures will be recorded at baseline, end of 8-week post-intervention period.