American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale Grade E Conversion After Spinal Cord Injury: Incidence, Conversion Characteristics, and Impact of Age on Functional Independence.
Gianmarco Brancato, Christian Schuld, Laura Heutehaus and 7 others
PMID 40873959WHAT IT FOUND
Normal spinal injury test scores did not mean normal daily function.
Only 49.3% were fully independent at first conversion, and adults over 70 had the lowest independence.
Key findings
01AIS E was rare in this SCI database, appearing in 2% of individuals, and first conversion to AIS E occurred at a median of 171 days after injury.
02At first conversion to AIS E, 49.33% of the 75 people with a SCIM III assessment had full independence on the total score, while stair management and mobility outdoors were the most affected items.
03Older adults had lower full independence than younger adults: 28.57% of the senior cohort achieved full mobility independence compared with 88.46% of the young cohort.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The final AIS E sample was small: 82 individuals overall, 75 with a SCIM III assessment at first conversion, and only 20 with a later SCIM III assessment. Four people classified AIS E in the very acute stage were excluded because their initial deficits were not confirmed as spinal cord injury. Comorbidities, preinjury walking ability, and exact injury cause were not documented, so older adults' lower independence could reflect other conditions rather than SCI. There was no age-matched non-SCI control group, so SCI-related deficits cannot be separated from normal aging effects in this analysis. The age change-point analysis was exploratory and may have been affected by the small dataset and the database's bimodal age distribution.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The supplied text does not state a funding source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read an AIS E grade as full recovery from spinal cord injury. In this dataset, 49.33% of the 75 people assessed at first conversion had full independence on total SCIM III, and adults over 70 had full independence in only 14.29% of total SCIM III cases.