High-tops and ankle sprains

[guava_wrench]

I was watching the Rubio ankle sprain and it inspired me to search the Internet. Rubio was wearing running shoes and ended up with a 90 degree inversion of his ankle.

The following study finds that high tops seem to reduce the rate of inversion in sprains:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1323436/

On the other hand, this article seems to say that high tops can be detrimental due do differences in how muscles are activated:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943374/

An older study seems to agree with the first:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7573650

This one also considers taping:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11508522

The overall message I get is that this is a hard topic to study because we can't do double blinded experiments where where we invert people's ankles on purpose.