The Responsiveness of the Emory Functional Ambulation Profile in Rehabilitation of Ambulant Stroke Survivors
Abstract
Background: The Emory Functional Ambulation Profile (EFAP) was designed to measure functional ambulation in post-stroke survivors. Its' ability to detect the effectiveness of any physical therapy protocol has been sparsely investigated.Objectives: This study aimed to determine the ability of the EFAP to detecting patients' response to a physical therapy protocol in stroke rehabilitation.
Methods: The pretest-posttest experimental design was used for this study. Seventeen consecutive stroke survivors who met the inclusion criteria were recruited into the study. Participants received a conservative physical therapy protocol twice weekly for 8 weeks. Performance on individual subtasks of the EFAP were measured and recorded for each participant before and at the end of the study. Data was available at the posttest for only 14 participants (mean age = 57.00 9.05 years; average poststroke period = 19.71 26.56 months) and this was analyzed using frequency and percentages with inferential statistics of paired t-test at .05 alpha level.
Results: Participants scores for all the EFAP subtasks and overall scores improved (reduced task completion time) at the end of the treatment programme. Responsiveness for the EFAP ranged from 3% to 21% for all subtasks. Changes were even significant for three [floor carpet, up and go] out of the 5 subtasks and the total EFAP scores (p<.05)
Conclusion: EFAP was able to detect the response of stroke survivors to the physical therapy protocol used in this study and is therefore recommended for use by clinicians and researchers for measuring treatment outcome.
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