Translation and cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese of the Modified Tardieu Scale for muscle tone assessment among patients with spinal cord injury.

Background: Assessment of muscle tone is of great importance for evaluating people with spinal injuries.

Objective: To translate and adapt the Modified Tardieu Scale (MTS) to Brazilian Portuguese and validate its use for evaluating patients with spinal cord injury.

Methods: The translation and adaptation of the "Escala de Tardieu Modificada" went through the steps of translation, translation synthesis, back-translation and expert committee meeting. Two evaluators rated the tone of the elbow flexors/extensors, wrist extensors, knee flexors/extensors and ankle plantar flexors of 51 patients with spinal cord injury. These patients were reevaluated after one week. Validation included intra and inter-rater reliability (ICC) and internal and external consistency. The Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS) was used in the evaluations, to investigate the correlations.

Results: The Brazilian Portuguese version of the MTS is presented in this study. ICCs ranged from 0.60 to 0.99 (intra and inter-examiner) and there was a moderate to strong correlation with MAS.

Conclusions: The MTS proved to be adequate for assessing the muscle tone of people with spinal cord injury in Brazil.