Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the suitability of the Revised version of the Korean Spinal Cord Independence Measure (KSCIM-R), which is a functional evaluation tool for spinal cord injury.
Method: Thirty patients with spinal cord injury were enrolled. The KSCIM was modified to as KSCIM-R. Inter- rater reliability and relative sensitivity of KSCIM-R were evaluated by two raters, biweekly.
Results: The Kappa coefficient of the various individual tasks in the KSCIM-R ranged between 0.71 and 0.95 (mean: 0.82), which was higher than the previous version, KSCIM. High correlations were found between the total KSCIM-R scores of the paired raters (r=0.95, p<0.01), and between KSCIM-R scores and total FIM scores (r=0.90, p<0.01). The KSCIM-R detected all the functional changes detected by FIM total scoring, however the FIM missed changes in 16 (16%) of 102 sequential test batteries, which was detected by KSCIM-R total scoring.
Conclusion: These results demonstrated that the KSCIM-R is reliable and more sensitive than the FIM and KSCIM in reflecting the functional changes of SCI patients.
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