Novel Outcome Measures for Traumatic and Nontraumatic Spinal Cord Injury

Traumatic and nontraumatic spinal cord injury including degenerative cervical myelopathy, produce heterogeneous neurologic and functional deficits that are incompletely captured by traditional outcome measures. This review summarizes widely used clinician-reported and patient-reported instruments across quality of life, functional independence, and global and focal neurologic assessment, highlighting limitations such as ceiling/floor effects, incomplete domain coverage, and variable responsiveness. Emerging approaches-including batteries of complementary assessments, hybrid measures, digital health tools, imaging biomarkers, and neurophysiology-offer improved sensitivity and multidimensional assessment. Standardized core outcome sets may improve clinical management, reduce reporting heterogeneity, and improve comparability across studies.