Nutech functional score: A novel scoring system to assess spinal cord injury patients

To develop a new scoring system, nutech functional scores (NFS) for assessing the patients with spinal cord injury (SCI).

The conventional scale, American Spinal Injury Association's (ASIA) impairment scale is a measure which precisely describes the severity of the SCI. However, it has various limitations which lead to incomplete assessment of SCI patients. We have developed a 63 point scoring system, i.e., NFS for patients suffering with SCI. A list of symptoms either common or rare that were found to be associated with SCI was recorded for each patient. On the basis of these lists, we have developed NFS.

These lists served as a base to prepare NFS, a 63 point positional (each symptom is sub-graded and get points based on position) and directional (moves in direction BAD → GOOD) scoring system. For non-progressive diseases, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 denote worst, bad, moderate, good and best (normal), respectively. NFS for SCI has been divided into different groups based on the affected part of the body being assessed, i.e., motor assessment (shoulders, elbow, wrist, fingers-grasp, fingers-release, hip, knee, ankle and toe), sensory assessment, autonomic assessment, bed sore assessment and general assessment. As probability based studies required a range of (-1, 1) or at least the range of (0, 1) to be useful for real world analysis, the grades were converted to respective numeric values.

NFS can be considered as a unique tool to assess the improvement in patients with SCI as it overcomes the limitations of ASIA impairment scale.