To investigate the effectiveness of backward walking in the treatment of people with gait impairments related to neurological and musculoskeletal disorders.
Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized and quasi-randomized control studies.
Searched from the date of inception to March 2018, and included PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Library, PEDro, CINAHL, and the MEDLINE databases.
Investigating the effects of backward walking on pain, functional disability, muscle strength, gait parameters, balance, stability, and plantar pressure in people with gait impairments. The PEDro scale was used to assess the quality. Similar outcomes were pooled by calculating the standardized mean difference.
Of the 21 studies (neurological 11 and musculoskeletal 10), 635 participants were included. The average PEDro score was 5.4/10. The meta-analysis demonstrated significant standardized mean difference values in favour of backward walking, with conventional physiotherapy treatment for two to four weeks to reduce pain (-0.87) and functional disability (-1.19) and to improve quadriceps strength (1.22) in patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis. The balance and stability in cases of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and gait parameters and muscle strength in anterior cruciate ligament injury improved significantly when backward walking was included as an exercise. There was no significant evidence in favour of backward walking in any of the other conditions.
The systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that backward walking with conventional physiotherapy treatment is effective and clinically worthwhile in patients with knee osteoarthritis. Insufficient evidence was available for the remaining gait impairment conditions and no conclusions could be drawn.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 331. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 16 September 2026.
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Outputs of similar age from Clinical Rehabilitation
#1
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Altmetric has tracked 34,340,594 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,293 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.5. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its peers.
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