October 2019 marks PEDro’s 20th birthday! For 20 years PEDro has been providing physiotherapists around the world with easy access to high-quality clinical research so they can practice effectively and safely. We are proud to have had this impact on the practice of physiotherapy world-wide, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our PEDro users and supporters.

PEDro was conceived in 1999, just 4 years after the launch of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, when evidence-based practice was in its infancy. Since then PEDro has been used to answer over 24-million questions. These searches have been performed by physiotherapists from 237 countries and territories. At the top of the league table of PEDro users is Brazil (23%), followed by the United States (9%), Spain (8%), Australia (7%), and France (5%).

The exponential growth in the number of trials, reviews and guidelines evaluating physiotherapy interventions has been tracked by PEDro. When launched in 1999, PEDro contained just 600 articles. In the October 2019 update PEDro contains nearly 45,000 articles. PEDro is predicted to double in size over the next 6 years.

To celebrate 20 years of informing physiotherapy practice, PEDro will be identifying the Top 5 Trials published in 2014-2019 and launching a sister database that indexes primary studies and systematic reviews evaluating the accuracy of diagnostic tests used by physiotherapists (called DiTA). We will also be refreshing the PEDro web-site.