Development of the Palpation Domain for Muscle and Skin in the Global Body Examination

Abstract

Objectives

To develop new scales within palpation of muscle and skin domains based on 16 items from the Global Physiotherapy Examination and 46 items from the Comprehensive Body Examination [CBE], and to investigate how well these new scales would discriminate between healthy individuals and different groups of patients, when compared with the original methods.

Methods

Two physiotherapists independently examined 132 persons [34 healthy, 32 with localized pain, 32 with widespread pain, and 34 with psychoses]. Muscle and skin domains were studied separately. The numbers of items were reduced by omitting items with too high a correlation and by exploratory factor analysis [EFA]. Internal consistency was examined with Cronbach's α. Discriminative validity was examined using the Mann–Whitney U-test and the area under the curve.

Results

Only items from the left body half was included in the EFA, as very high correlation [mean r  =  0.90] was found in the 23 bilateral palpation pairs in CBE. The initial 62 items were reduced to 11 for palpation of muscle and 5 for palpation of skin. Cronbach's α was 0.88 for the subscales for Muscle and Skin. The new Palpation domain in the Global Body Examination showed excellent discriminative ability between healthy persons and the different patient groups [P  <  0.001; area under the curve 0.81–0.94]. Patients with localized pain had significantly less muscular and skin aberration than patients with widespread pain.

Conclusions

A new Global Body Examination Palpation domain with acceptable psychometric properties was developed. It had fewer items than the Global Physiotherapy Examination and CBE, but with almost the same discriminating ability.

Keywords:

• Body examination
• palpation
• normative data
• musculoskeletal pain
• psychotic disorders

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Norwegian Fund for Post-Graduate Training in Physiotherapy.

Declaration of Interest: The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this paper.