Assessment of mirror movements in children and adolescents with unilateral cerebral palsy: reliability of the Woods and Teuber scale

Abstract

AIM To investigate the inter- and intrarater reliability of the Woods and Teuber scale todetect mirror movements in children and adolescents with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP).METHOD A convenience sample of children and adolescents with unilateral CP (n=68; 31males, 37 females; mean age 12y 2mo, SD 3y 6mo) in Manual Ability Classification levels I toIII was recruited from Norway, Australia, and Belgium. Three therapists scored mirrormovements according to the Woods and Teuber scale from three video-recorded tasks at twoseparate time points. A two-way, mixed model regression was used to calculate intraclasscorrelation coefficients (ICCs) reflecting overall inter- and intrarater reliability. In addition,ICCs for each hand and task were calculated separately.RESULTS The overall interrater reliability ICC was 0.90 and the corresponding intraraterreliability ICC was 0.92. The ICCs for each hand ranged from 0.86 to 0.92 and for each taskfrom 0.63 to 0.89.INTERPRETATION The Woods and Teuber scale shows excellent reliability for scoring mirrormovements in children and adolescents with unilateral CP. The assessment is easy toadminister with no need for specific equipment and scoring can be determined from shortvideo recordings, making it a feasible instrument in research and clinical practice