A systematic Review: Aquatic Therapy on Arthritis

The following key words were searched using the Web of Science database: “aqua*” AND “exercise” AND “*arthritis”. The year of the publication was not restricted to any specific year. The language of the studies was limited to English and the resulting database was extracted on an excel file. After the extraction of the database, studies without the words aquatic, exercise or arthritis in the titles were excluded from the study. Meta-analyses and systematic reviews were excluded from the database as well. Studies not relating to aquatic therapy and any form of arthritis were not included. Only studies in which subjects selected were diagnosed with any form of arthritis were included. Reports where subjects were not inside the water performing an exercise protocol was excluded. Reports that consisted of both aquatic therapy and class education outside the pool were also included. There was no exclusion in water temperature used in the studies. Studies were individually reviewed for relevance and then categorized into the age of the subjects used, the type of arthritis subjects were diagnosed with, the number of aquatic exercise training performed each week, the length of the aquatic exercise training and the span of the experiment. Studies that were not restricted to subjects of one type of arthritis were independently classified. Experiments performed on subjects with a large range of age were independently classified. The frequency of studies performed on different forms of arthritis, age groups were counted. The number of studies with different frequency of aquatic exercise training a week, the length of the training and the total span the experiment took were also characteristics of interest.