Longitudinal reference centiles for the Gross Motor Function Measure-66 in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy.
Ibrahim Duran, Leonie Schafmeyer, Bruno Lentzen and 4 others
PMID 40765172WHAT IT FOUND
New reference centiles allow therapists to judge if a child's gross motor gain over six months is clinically meaningful.
They extend assessment to adolescents up to 18 years and show high agreement with previous methods for detecting both improvement and deterioration.
Key findings
01The new tool accurately detects clinically relevant motor improvement in 93.6% of cases and deterioration in 98.1% of cases.
02The new reference centiles are applicable to children and adolescents aged 3 to 18 years, removing the previous upper age limit of 12 years.
03There is a very high correlation between the new z-score method and the previous individual effect size method.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The data comes from a specific rehabilitation programme in Germany, so generalizability to other healthcare systems may be limited. Children with GMFCS levels I and V were underrepresented because they were less likely to attend the rehabilitation programme. The reference values are strictly for a 6-month observation period (plus or minus 1 month). Longer or shorter intervals will yield inaccurate results. The study is a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data, which may introduce selection bias.
Declared interests
The study received no external funding. Participation was funded by the German healthcare system.
The easy way to misread this
Do not apply these centiles to observation periods significantly longer or shorter than six months. The authors state that longer periods overestimate motor development and shorter periods underestimate it.
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