What is it about?
Measuring thigh muscle (quadriceps) strength is extremely important in the physical therapy clinic in people with knee problems. The quadriceps is the largest stabilizer of the knee and can become very weak after injury. However, the best tools to measure strength are large, expensive, and generally unavailable to most clinicians. Therefore we identified two other ways to measure quadriceps strength using a small digital device to measure strength and a leg extension machine. These two measures did a fair job compared to the gold standard, but some differences in interpreting results are needed to be consistent with the gold standard.
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Why is it important?
This work tries to make strength testing of the quadriceps in the clinic available to more clinicians. Many physical therapists want to measure strength but they do not have the expensive equipment and are unsure of a good way to measure strength otherwise in relationship to the literature. This work helps to make the testing available in more settings.
Perspectives
Our goal with this project was to make valid testing reliable to more people - both patients and clinicians. We have seen many people return for testing who were told that they were "strong" who in fact had a 20% difference between their legs because their physical therapist didn't have a good way to test their strength. Hopefully this will improve in the future with this work and the development of less expensive technologies.
Dr Andrew D Lynch
University of Pittsburgh
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Diagnostic Accuracy of Handheld Dynamometry and 1-Repetition-Maximum Tests for Identifying Meaningful Quadriceps Strength Asymmetries, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, February 2017, Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (JOSPT),
DOI: 10.2519/jospt.2017.6651.
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