"Narrative Review of Clinical Practice Guidelines for Rehabilitation of People with Spinal Cord Injury

Lynn H. Gerber, Rati Deshpande, Shruthi Prabhakar, Cindy Cai, Steven Garfinkel, Leslie Morse, Amanda L. Harrington
2020 American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation  
Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) provide reliable, vetted, and critical information to bring research to practice. Some medical specialties, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R) is one, provide multi-domain treatment for various conditions. This presents challenges because PM&R is a small specialty, a diverse patient base in terms socio-demographics and diagnosis, treatments are difficult to standardize and rehabilitation research is underfunded. We wished to identify quality and
more » ... cability of CPGs and searched "Spinal Cord Injury AND Clinical Practice Guidelines AND Rehabilitation and vetting process.Three hundred fifty-nine articles were identified of which 58 met all criteria for full-text review of which 13 were included in the final selection. Additional publications were accessed from a non-database search. Five articles addressed post-acute care, community treatment. Nine articles had no recorded vetting process but addressed rehabilitation as an outcome and were included separately. Many of the CPGs were developed without evidence from randomized controlled trials, one had input from stakeholders, some are out of date and don't address important aspects of changes in demographics of the affected population, the use of newer technologies such as sensors and robotics and devices. Identification of these gaps may help stimulate treatment that is clinically relevant, accessible and current.
doi:10.1097/phm.0000000000001637 pmid:33164995 fatcat:qmgrugovijgd7atnjqzjjwt25m