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Description: Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common joint diseases, being a cause of disability in world´s population.1 The OA affects multiple joint tissues such as cartilage, subchondral bone and synovium, leading to decrease of joint space and inflammation which results in pain, swelling, stiffness and, ultimately, impairment of joint function.2–4 Since there is no treatment to effectively prevent OA, clinical therapeutic strategies target pain management that delay the disease progression. The first-line recommended treatments are weight loss and exercise-based physiotherapy.1–3 Light therapy (LT) is one of many physiotherapy modalities explored in knee OA treatment as stimulates cartilage repair, demonstrating anti-inflammatory and pain modulation effects.5–7 The mechanism by which LT produce stimulatory effects results from light absorption at cellular level.8 The LT is not implemented yet in routine clinical management for knee OA,2,9,10 stressing the demand for more comprehensive systematization towards its therapeutic effects on knee OA treatment, before recommending its use in daily practice. Previous systematic reviews with meta-analysis attempted to analyse the efficiency of LT in patients with knee OA, presenting conflicting results in terms of pain relief and disability decrease.11–13 Sensitivity analyses, publication bias and recommendations based on the certainty of evidence were not widely explored in those systematic reviews, focusing only on pain and function outcomes. Two of these systematic reviews11,13 performed subgroup analysis according to WALT guidelines, which is limitative since those guidelines are only valid for GaAlAs and GaAs lasers at certain wavelengths.14,15 Our main goal is thus to conduct a systematic review with meta-analysis that comprises the several outcomes measures at different evaluation times and employ a more rigorous data synthesis procedures, as well as categorization of data synthesis, risk of bias assessment and recommendation based on the certainty of evidence. Given the growing scientific evidence of LT as a promising intervention for OA treatment, this information will represent a valuable insight for future investigations in this research area.

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