Bioenergetic comparison of a new energy-storing foot and SACH foot in traumatic below-knee vascular amputations

Transtibial amputee gait efficiency: Energy storage and return versus solid ankle cushioned heel prosthetic feet

“…However, this reduction is very small, with the mean cost of amputee walking across all ESR feet being 97.3 percent of that with a SACH foot. This confirms what only a few studies have shown with statistical significance (p < 0.05) [12][13]. The majority of studies have failed to obtain statistically significant results [3][4]6,[14][15][16][17][18], probably because of insufficient statistical power to detect such small differences.…”

“…The majority of studies have failed to obtain statistically significant results [3][4]6,[14][15][16][17][18], probably because of insufficient statistical power to detect such small differences. The lack of a relationship between speed and normalized ESR COT (Figure 2(b)) was unexpected because it has previously been suggested that ESR feet may only be effective compared with SACH feet at higher walking speeds [3,12]. It is interesting to note that the apparent clustering of the 10 lowest points in the normalized ESR COT analysis (Figure 2(b)) is based on data from six different studies [4,[12][13]15,[17][18] and six different ESR foot designs.…”

“…We required the studies to contain metabolic cost of walking data, either per minute or per meter. After the application of the four additional criteria, we identified nine articles [3,4,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]] from Hofstad et al's [19] systematic review that contained the necessary data for our meta-analysis. In addition, we identified only one article (Mengelkoch et al [6]) published after the systematic review that contained the relevant data and met the necessary selection criteria for the normalization method.…”

“…Some articles have found a statistically significant, albeit small, improvement in COT with ESR versus SACH feet [12][13]. Most studies, however, have failed to demonstrate any statistically significant differences [3,4,6,[14][15][16][17][18].…”

“…Additionally, we analyzed the data to see whether there was a relationship with walking speed since it is thought that ESR feet may be more effective at higher speeds [3,12].…”