Arthralgia: a map of Cochrane evidence relevant to rehabilitation for people with post COVID-19 condition

INTRODUCTION: Rehabilitation focuses on impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions being informed by the underlying health condition. In the current absence of direct “evidence on” rehabilitation interventions for people with post COVID-19 condition (PCC), we can search and synthesize the indirect “evidence relevant to” coming from interventions effective on the symptoms of PCC in other health conditions. The World Health Organization (WHO) required this information to inform expert teams and provide specific recommendations in its Guidelines. With this overview of reviews with mapping we aimed to synthesize the Cochrane evidence relevant to rehabilitation for arthralgia due to PCC in a map. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: We searched the last five years’ Cochrane Systematic Review (CSRs) using the terms “arthralgia,” “joint pain,” and “rehabilitation” and their synonyms in the Cochrane Library. We extracted and summarized all the available evidence using a map. We grouped the included CSRs for health conditions and interventions, indicating the effect and the quality of evidence. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: We found 200 CSRs published between 2016 and 2021, and included 11 in this overview. They provided data from 7 health conditions, with osteoarthritis (5 studies) being the most studied. Effective rehabilitation interventions included exercise training, transcranial magnetic stimulation, different types of electrical stimulation and Tai chi. The overall quality of evidence was mainly low to very low, and moderate in a few cases. CONCLUSIONS: These results provided the requested information to the WHO and served as the basis for one recommendation on treatments for arthralgia due to PCC in the current Guidelines for clinical practice. These results should be interpreted as a first step of indirect evidence able to generate helpful hypotheses for future research.