Effect of Capacitive Tecar Therapy on Foot Pain and Tactile Sensation in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

 Because of the significant prevalence of diabetes, disability of patients due to the complication of Diabeti Neuropathy (DN) has been increased. Physiotherapy is one of the methods for DN which can help control the symptoms through modalities such as infrared radiation, electrical stimulation and electromagnetic fields. Tecar therapy is a form of electromagnetic fields.This study investigated the effect of Capacitive Tecar therapy on pain and tactile sensation of the feet in type 2 diabetics with symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. 

This clinical trial was performed as pre-test and post-test with a control group. The samples consisted of 24 diabetics aged 17-78 years with symtoms of peripheral neuropathy allocated in the control and experimental group randomly. The patients of experimental groups participated in 10 sessions and received the Capasitive tecar therapy with 10%-30% intensity in addition to infrared radiatin; the controls received the same protocol with zero intensity of tecar. Pain and tactile sensation of the soles were evaluated before and after sessions. The collected data were analyzed by the Reapeted measure Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA). All statistical analyses were performed in SPSS V. 18. The significance level was set at P<0.05.

 The results of Rearetd Measure ANOVA showed that there was a significant difference in the mean scores of pain and tactile sensation of soles in the post-test compared to the pre-test of two groups.(P<0.001).There was also a significant difference in the means of post-test scores of variable pain (P=0.002) and tactile sensation (P<0.001) between the two groups. The improvement of variables in experimental group was more than control group.

 The results of this study revealed that Tecar Therapy with infrared radiation can be an appropriate therapeutic program for improving pain and tactile sensation of soles in diabetic patients with symptoms of peripheral neuropathy.