The Global Body Examination (GBE): A useful instrument for examination of patients with long-lasting musculoskeletal and/or psychological disorders

Abstract

The aims of this study were to present a newly developed clinical tool for examination of physical aberrations in different patient groups, and examine the degree to which this new instrument, the Global Body Examination (GBE), can discriminate between healthy people and patients. Two physiotherapists independently examined 132 individuals (34 healthy, 32 with localized pain, 32 with widespread pain, 34 with psychoses). One tester used the Comprehensive Body Examination with 112 items and the other used the Global Physiotherapy Examination with 52 items when examining posture, respiration, movements, muscle and skin. To extract the most useful items for the new GBE, correlational analysis, exploratory factor analysis and examination of internal consistency were used. Sumscores from the different main domains and subscales of GBE were used to examine the discriminative ability between healthy individuals and the three patient groups. Mann–Whitney U test and area under the curve (AUC) were used to compare the different groups. GBE’s four main domains and 11 subscales discriminated significantly between healthy people and patients (AUC from 0.79 to 0.95), and to some extent also between the patient groups. The new instrument demonstrated acceptable to outstanding discriminative abilities and seems useful for examining different patient groups.

Keywords:

• Movement
• palpation
• physical characteristics
• posture
• respiration

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding information

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