Table of Contents

ABSTRACT

Cerebral palsy, a range of non- progressive syndromes of posture and motor impairment, is a common cause of disability in childhood. Children with cerebral palsy have more balancing challenges than typically developing children. Given the importance of balance ability for functional movement in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy, a valid and reliable measure which is clinically feasible and less time consuming for assessing limits of stability in various directions was requested. Hence there is a need to establish validity, intra-rater, and inter-rater reliability of a multidirectional reach test in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy. Study design: Cross sectional analytical study. Methods: 30 subjects who were diagnosed with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy in the age group of 5-15 years were recruited in this study. Their balance was assessed with the Multidirectional reach test (MDRT) and Geamaster (posturography). Results: The result of the study showed that intra-rater reliability of MDRT was found to be excellent for all the four directions including forward, backward, right lateral & left lateral directions (ICC = 0.99). Inter-rater reliability of MDRT in our study was found to be excellent in all the four directions (ICC = 0.98-0.99). MDRT demonstrated significant correlation with the scores of Geamaster. Conclusion: Multi-directional reach test is an inexpensive, easy to administer, less time consuming, reliable, and valid tool for measuring the limits of stability in all four directions in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy.

Keywords: Reliability, validity, Multidirectional reach test, cerebral palsy