LAUSR

We would like to thank Dr. Stasinopoulos for his interest and comments regarding our recent publication entitled “Does Kinesiotaping improve pain and functionality in patients with newly diagnosed lateral epicondylitis?” We very carefully read all the comments regarding our publication. The letter mainly addresses concerns regarding the methodology. We welcome the opportunity to clarify and expand our methodology. We will address each concern individually. Regarding the first concern, the author advocated that the use of the term “lateral elbow tendinopathy” was more appropriate term than that of “lateral epicondylitis”. According to his previously published article [20], the author described in detail their preferred term lateral elbow tendinopathy (LET). However, a wide variety of terms can still be used to define the painful and degenerative conditions of the lateral elbow including tennis elbow, tennis elbow syndrome, epicondylitis, epicondylalgia, tendonitis, tendinosis and tendinopathy [1, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22]. To clarify the term “lateral elbow tendinopathy”, we cross-checked the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords. The MeSH library defines the term “lateral epicondylitis”, as a condition characterized by pain in or near the lateral humeral epicondyle or in the forearm extensor muscle mass, resulting from unusual strain. Unfortunately, the term you suggested “lateral elbow tendinopathy” was not found in the MeSH library. Therefore, we preferred using the term “lateral epicondylitis” in our published article instead of “lateral elbow tendinopathy” as the commenter suggested. The second concern argues why we used TENS and cryo-therapy. A variety of non-surgical treatment options are available for the treatment of the LET; however, there is no consensus-based gold standard [6, 19, 23]. Although, electrotherapy modalities and non-electrotherapy modalities have previously been described in the management of symptoms, the collective findings of these studies have no consensus regarding the effectiveness of supplementing a rehabilitation program with ice and/or electrotherapy modalities [6, 10, 19, 23]. In some studies, TENS was found to be effective in decreasing short-term pain intensity in patients with LET [6, 19, 23]. Besides, multi-model treatment approach has shown possible beneficial effects in patients with LET [16]. Therefore, we used TENS and cold therapy in our short-term study and found it effective in decreasing pain intensity and recovering the functionality. The third concern highlighted the missing reference. We described the effectiveness of kinesiotaping in previous sentences according to Fu et al. [7] and Kase et al. [9] in support of our statement. Fourth, we do not agree with the author that a subgroup of the age would be more specific in the reporting of our results. Previous literature has established that LET occurs between the ages of 35 and 64 years in the literature [13], and the age range of the participants in our study are consistent with those findings [13]. Fifth, we explained in detail the effect of kinesiotaping on pain reduction and inflammation. Muscle and fascia correction techniques were applied according to the guidelines * Leyla Eraslan [email protected]