ABSTRACT
High prevalence and large economic impact of knee injuries related to athletic activities led to the development of different protocols for injury prevention, management and/or rehabilitation in the past decades, with the use of various knee braces among the most popular. Braces have been used to reduce knee injuries in top-level sport since the beginning (Wirth and DeLee, 1990), with their popularity exploding from the early 1980s, when a multitude of manufacturers started to promote several brace models for use in American football and other contact and non-contact sports. Yet, debate over their true efficacy was ongoing in medical circles because injuries did continue to occur despite the use of braces (Najibi and Albright, 2005). Today, with the advance of biomechanical techniques, functional approach and epidemiological investigations into the effectiveness of bracing, the use of functional knee braces in athletes with joint instability is seriously questioned. This chapter provides a review of the applicability of functional knee braces in reinjury prevention and for athletic performance. Besides clinical significance of knee injuries, the design of functional braces will be discussed, as well as the effects of knee bracing for injury prevention in athletes with insufficient knee ligaments, and its effectiveness on physiological parameters of sport performance in anterior cruciate-deficient knees.
