Japanese Orthopaedic Association Cervical Myelopathy Evaluation Questionnaire (JOACMEQ): part 4. Establishment of equations for severity scores

摘要

To establish a patient-oriented outcome measure for cervical myelopathy, a subcommittee of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) developed a new scoring system to evaluate the overall clinical status of patients, which could be completed by patients themselves. The subcommittee completed three large-scale studies to select and modify questions derived from various preexisting outcome measures including Short Form-36, and then finalized and validated the questionnaire, which comprised 24 questions.