Diagnosis and management of neuropathic pain post-total knee replacement: A systematic review

Table 6 Data from publications - change in pain: Follow-up pain Visual Analogue Scale and difference from baseline

No.	Ref.	Year	FU number I	FU number C	VAS FU I	VAS FUI_SD	VAS FU C	VAS FU C_SD	VAS MD	VAS CI MD	VAS SMD	VAS CI SMD
1	Rienstra et al[18]	2021	20	28	2.5	1.6	2.4	1.9	0.1	-0.9 to 1.1	0.055	-0.51 to 0.62
2	Buvanendran et al[25]	2010	113	115
3	Albayrak et al[23]	2017	22	17	2	1.6	2.8	2.1	-0.8	-2.0 to 0.4	-0.428	-1.06 to 0.20
4	Kretzschmar[15]	2019	9	0	1.8	0.4			-3.2 to -0.6		-0.42 to -2.47
5	Yang et al[22]	2022	37	18	0.9	1.2	5	1.7	-4.1	-4.9 to -3.3	-2.93	-3.71 to -2.15
6	Zhong et al[21]	2018	22	38	1.2	0.3	4.1	1.4	-2.9	-3.4 to -2.3	-2.53	-3.22 to -1.84
7	Clendenen et al[20]	2015	16	0	2	2.8			-3.0 to -0.4		-0.16 to -1.26

Table 6 gives the number and the extracted pain Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) at follow-up between 6 months and 12 months after intervention noting pain severity in the intervention and control/comparator arms with the SD. The first paper used the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score pain scale which required reversing the direction and division by 10 to make it comparable to the VAS scale. Data was extracted from a figure for the Kretzschmar[15] study. The MD and the 95% confidence interval are given for comparative studies to allow easy reference to the VAS minimum clinically important difference of 2. The SMD is calculated (Hedges g, as some samples were quite small) along with the 95% confidence interval. For the single arm studies, we calculated the MD/SMD using the highest and lowest values for the control arm in other studies to provide a possible range of MD and SMD. FU: Follow-up; I: Intervention; n: Number; C: Control/comparator; VAS: Visual Analogue Scale; CI: Confidence interval.