Visual Assessment of Movement Impairment During Walking in Subjects With Tibiofemoral Rotation Syndrome: A Concurrent Validity Study

TL;DR

This study shows that visual assessment is good at identifying movement issues in people with tibiofemoral rotation syndrome during walking, but less reliable for ruling them out.

Contribution

The study provides new evidence on the concurrent validity of visual assessment for movement impairments in TFRS patients.

Findings

Visual assessment had high sensitivity (98%) for detecting movement impairments in TFRS subjects.

Specificity was low (16.7%), indicating poor ability to confirm absence of impairments in non-TFRS subjects.

Positive predictive value was 81.5%, showing reasonable accuracy in confirming impairments when present.

Abstract

This study aimed to assess the validity of visual assessment in diagnosing lower extremity impairments during level walking.

Twenty-eight subjects (17 women, 11 men) with tibiofemoral rotation syndrome (TFRS) were examined using visual assessment as the index test and 3-dimensional (3D) motion analysis as the reference test. Both knee joint movements and the index and reference tests were evaluated simultaneously.

The sensitivity and specificity of visual assessment for detecting movement impairments were Se: 98% and Sp: 16.7%, respectively. The positive and negative predictive values were PPV: 81.5% and NPV: 50%, respectively. The positive and negative likelihood ratios were PLR: 1.18 and NLR: 0.12.

The results demonstrate excellent validity of visual assessment for identifying movement impairments in subjects with TFRS during level walking. However, this test's validity for detecting the absence of movement impairments in subjects without TFRS was poor.

Figures