Research Perspectives and Considerations in Assessing Spinal Cord Injury Population

For identifying the best treatment methods and routines to help patients return to their previous lives, the first step is to identify the correct assessment tool to robustly assess the efficacy of interventions both at the level of clinical treatments and in the context of clinical trials. This systematic review aimed to provide clinicians and researchers information regarding existing outcome measures to assess people with SCI. Results of this systematic review show 298 assessment tools that evaluate people with SCI. Authors have described the flavor of the marked heterogeneity in using assessment tools and have deliberately avoided suggestions that one scale is better than another. They have focused on the most commonly used scales. Building an international consensus in this area will ensure an improvement in the quality of care, rehabilitation, and health care systems’ efficiency. In addition, using the same outcome measures at the international level can help to have comparable data and identify evidence-based best practices.