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New Gait Assessment Tool for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) often have problems walking. Tight, spastic muscles limit their hip, knee, and ankle motion. Many are pulled down into a crouch position when walking. They can't straighten up. All these variables affect the way they walk.

Treatment is often focused on managing gait problems. Having a way to measure improvements before and after treatment is helpful. Most therapists don't have access to a gait laboratory with video and computer analysis of walking patterns. Observational gait assessment (OGA) is the best alternative.

There are several OGAs currently in use. Patients are viewed from the side while walking. Position of the hip, knee, and ankle are recorded at different points in the gait cycle. There aren't very many studies to test these scales and make sure they are accurate and reliable.

Researchers in England are working on developing a new gait assessment tool. It's called the Salford Gait Tool (SF-GT). The SF-GT uses a five-point scoring system. Positions of the hip, knee, and ankle are recorded at six points in the gait cycle.

In this report, the authors review the steps they've taken so far to develop and test the SF-GT. They tested the tool out on 13 children with CP. A group of 23 physical therapists used the SF-GT to score each child's gait.

The authors were able to analyze how much agreement there was among the therapists. They could use this information to compare the SF-GT to other OGA tools. It turns out there was good agreement among all the SF-GT scores.

The next question to study is: how much disagreement is acceptable for the SF-GT to still be considered a valid tool? Further work will be done to evaluate this new gait assessment tool.

References: Brigitte Toro, PhD, et al. The Development and Validity of the Salford Gait Tool: An Observation-Based Clinical Gait Assessment Tool. In Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. March 2007. Vol. 88. No. 3. Pp. 321-327.

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