PREVENTING AND TREATING LATE LIFE COMPLICATIONS OF DISABILITY
THROUGH IMPROVED ASSESSMENT OF WEAKNESS
Principal Investigator: Sara Mulroy, Ph.D.
Purposes
The purposes of this study are 1) to determine how well doctors and therapists are able to detect and rate muscle weakness; 2) to quantify the severity of weakness in upper and lower extremities of people aging with polio or other conditions; 3) to correlate various degrees of muscle weakness in people with polio with functional abilities such as walking.
Methodology
A variety of methods are used, including testing the strength of patient and clinicians, training of physicians in how to manually test muscle strength, and gait analysis of patients in the Pathokinesiology Laboratory.
Preliminary Results
Clinicians do not evaluate muscle weakness well without
training. This is especially true for female clinicians who are trying to
test male patients because the latter are often stronger than the former
and thus male patients who have muscle weakness may be missed by female
clinicians. Among patients with polio, contralateral strength (the side
opposite the paralysis) is the major determinant of how good the person's
gait is.