Correlation among the Visual Gait Assessment Scale, Edinburgh Visual Gait Scale and Observational Gait Scale in children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy.

BACKGROUND Gait disorders are very common in children with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy (CP). In order to improve the CP children's gait and to quantify the outcomes of this intervention it becomes essential to perform an instrumented analysis before and after the intervention. OBJECTIVES To analyze the correlation among the Edinburgh Visual Gait Scale (EVGS), the Visual Gait Assessment Scale (VGAS) and the Observational Gait Scale (OGS). METHODS Cross sectional study aiming to analyze the gait of 8 children with spastic diplegia CP with level I or II in the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) through the EVGS, VGAS and OGS scales performed by 3 examiners. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Weighted Kappa scores were used to analyze the data considering a significance level of 5%. RESULTS The intra-rater analyses showed a moderate to excellent agreement (k=0.41, 1.00) among the methods of the children's classification, being the comparison between VGAS and the EVGS scales presented the highest level of agreement, while the OGS scale presented a considerable disagreement in comparison with other scales. The inter-rater agreement showed to be predominantly high. CONCLUSIONS The results provide evidence that the VGAS and the EVGS scales are more suitable for children's spastic diplegia CP gait assessment when compared to OGS.