Reliability of the endurance test for the erector spinae muscle

Abstract

Introduction: The low resistance of the erector spinae has been seen as a risk factor for developing chronic low back pain. The test of the erector spinae muscle endurance advocated by Biering-Sorensen has been used to assess the strength of the erector spinae muscle. Modifications of the measuring instrument require reliability studies. Objective: To evaluate the measurement of the erector spinae muscle endurance and the standard error of measurement (SEM) of the modified Biering-Sorensen test of erector spinae in women with chronic low back pain. Methods: Forty-eight sedentary women, aged 52 ±7, suffering from chronic low back pain, were tested. The position adopted was the prone position without the trunk on the examining table. Fixations were performed with straps at the ankles, knees and pelvis. The patient was instructed to maintain the shoulder blades in contact with the stadiometer as long as possible. The measurement was repeated, with measures 15 minutes apart. Results: Considering the confidence limits of Bland & Altman, - 40 and 68 seconds, the SEM was13 seconds and SEM% was 22. The ICC = 0.87 with p = 0.001. The first test was equal to 54 ± 36 seconds, and the retest = 67 ± 40 seconds. Conclusion: The endurance test of the erector spinae showed moderate reliability. Therefore, we suggest that, despite its applicability in clinical practice, the results should be interpreted carefully because the differences in mean erector spinae endurance of up to 13 seconds may be related to measurement error.

A Meta-Analysis of the Reliability of Four Field-Based Trunk Extension Endurance Tests

“…A total of 674 studies (46.4%) were eliminated after reading the title and abstract. Another 181 studies (12.4%) were removed after reading the full-text-120 studies did not use any trunk extensor muscle endurance field-based test (8.2%) and 61 articles did not meet the established inclusion criteria (4.2%) [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69].…”

“…This search process identified 103 empirical studies that met the inclusion criteria (7.1%), in which 28 articles (1.9%) reported some reliability coefficients [8][9][10][11]18,[23][24][25][26][27]43,[53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69] (resulting in 43 cohort groups, as 9 studies had more than 1 group) and 75 articles (5.1%) induced the reliability (see the references in Document S1 in the Supplementary Materials Section). Figure 1 shows the flow chart of the selection process of the studies.…”

“…Table S4 provides a descriptive summary of the characteristics of the included studies for the RG meta-analysis. The studies selected were carried out between 1986 and 2018 and comprised participants from four continents (Europe [8,10,24,43,[53][54][55][56][57][59][60][61]63,65,66], America [9,[25][26][27]64,[67][68][69], Asia [11,18,58,62], and Oceania [23]). Only one study was written in Spanish [60], and the rest of the selected studies were written in English [8][9][10][11]18,[23][24][25][26][27]43,[53][54][55][56][57][58][59][61]…”

“…Three studies used healthy children [57] and adolescents [27,62]. Furthermore, 14 studies employed asymptomatic samples [9,10,18,24,25,27,53,56,57,59,60,62,63,68,69], 8 used patients with low back pain (LBP) [8,54,55,58,[64][65][66][67], and 6 included both types of samples [11,23,26,43,61].…”

“…Concerning the type of field-based test used, 25 studies (89.2%) investigated the reliability of the back extensor endurance measures obtained through different modified versions of the Biering-Sorensen test [8][9][10]18,[23][24][25][26][27]43,53,54,56,57,[59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69], 4 studies (14.3%) used the prone isometric chest raise test (two of them used the original version [11,58] and another two used a modified version [18,55]), 2 studies employed a modified version of the dynamic extensor endurance test [27,62], (7.1%) and 1 study used the original prone double straight-leg raise test [18] (3.6%).…”