Measurements and Recovery Patterns in a Multicenter Study of Acute Spinal Cord Injury

Abstract

The prognosis of these patients with spinal cord injury seen at 28 centers in North America during the mid-1990s appears better than was often assumed earlier. The general patterns are similar across different measurement scales, although there are intriguing differences. The patterns in different strata are different in specifics, and complete injuries do less well. Pooling data from different strata may result in probability distributions that depart from normal-theory assumptions and give misleading results depending on recruitment patterns.