Journal article
Neurological examination for cervical radiculopathy: a scoping review
- Abstract:
-
Background: To diagnose cervical radiculopathy according to the International Association for the Study of Pain definition, signs of neurological deficits must be examined with the neurological examination. However, the diagnostic accuracy of the standard neurological examination remains unclear, and no clear recommendations exist about standard components. Therefore, the objectives of this review are to map the research about the diagnostic accuracy, components, and performance of the neurological examination for cervical radiculopathy.
Method: PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Cinhal, DiTA databases were searched up to February 23rd, 2024. Additional studies were identified through screening reference lists of the included studies. Studies on neurological examination procedures and their diagnostic accuracy for cervical radiculopathy were included.
Results: From an initial 12,365 records, 6 articles met the inclusion criteria. All articles were cross-sectional studies and compared the neurological examination with electrodiagnostic tests or magnetic resonance imaging. Reduced tendon reflexes were found to be most specific (81% (95% CI 69–89%) to 99% (95% CI not reported)), while somatosensation testing was least sensitive (25% (95% CI 12–38%; -LR 0.84) to 52% (95% CI 30–74%)). Taking all components into account resulted in higher specificity (98% (95% CI not reported) to 99% (95% CI 95–100%)) but lower sensitivity (7% (95% CI not reported) to 14% (95% CI 5–16%)) compared to electrodiagnostic tests.
Conclusions: We found varying operational definitions of radiculopathy, suboptimal reference standards, and great heterogeneity in the neurological examination procedure and its diagnostic accuracy. Future research should address these issues to establish the clinical utility of the neurological examination for cervical radiculopathy.
Protocol: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.22.23290194.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12891-025-08560-9
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Grant:
- 222101/Z/20/Z
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders More from this journal
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 334
- Publication date:
- 2025-04-05
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-03-21
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1471-2474
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2096592
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2096592
- Deposit date:
-
2025-03-21
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Yousif et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record