CORR Insights^®: What is the Minimum Clinically Important Difference in Grip Strength?

Excerpt

There is a trend towards evidence based medicine in the field of orthopaedic surgery, which will be even more prominent in the future. Evidence based medicine compares treatment options looking for differences in outcomes. The superiority of a treatment is often based on reporting a statistically significant difference. Clinicians are looking to this outcome data in order to choose best practices, and insurers are examining this data as part of pay-for-performance reforms. However, not all statistically significant differences are clinically meaningful, and therefore if evidence based medicine is going to provide recommendations that matter to patients, researchers will need to know the mean clinically important difference (MCID) of the measurements being analyzed. …