The Impact of Light Touch and Pin Prick on Functional Outcomes in Patients with Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury

A spinal cord injury (SCI) can cause severe lifelong functional disability and profoundly affect an individual’s daily life. We investigated the prediction of patients’ post-SCI functional outcomes by evaluating sensory scores rather than motor scores, as the latter’s association with functional outcomes is well established. We examined patients’ responses to a light touch (LT) and pin prick (PP) at admission and the response data’s usefulness as predictors of functional outcomes (i.e., ability to perform activities of daily living) at discharge. This exploratory observational study used data from the Japanese National Spinal Cord Injury Database (SCI-J). Data from 3,676 patients who met the inclusion criteria and were admitted for an SCI between 1997 and 2020 were analyzed. The motor score of the Functional Independence Measure (mFIM) at discharge was used as an index of functional outcome. A multiple regression analysis revealed that the mFIM was associated with both the LT response (β=0.07 (0.01), p<0.001) and the PP response (β=0.07 (0.01), p<0.001) at admission. The false discovery rate log-worth values for LT and PP were 6.6 and 8.5, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that LT and PP scores at admission can help predict patients’ functional outcomes after an SCI, although the magnitude of their contributions is not high.