Development of the Posture domain in the Global Body Examination (GBE)

Abstract The aim was to develop a new Posture domain based on eight postural items from the Global Physiotherapy Examination-52 (GPE-52) and 17 items from the Comprehensive Body Examination (CBE), and furthermore, to examine how the new scale discriminated between healthy individuals and different groups of patients compared with the original methods. Two physiotherapists independently examined 132 persons (34 healthy, 32 with localized pain, 32 with widespread pain, 34 with psychoses), each using one method. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to reduce number of items. Internal consistency of the final scales was examined with Cronbach's alpha. Discriminative ability was examined with Mann–Whitney U-test and receiver operating characteristics curve area. The initial 25 items were reduced to nine and integrated into three new subscales and one main domain scale for Posture with acceptable psychometric properties. The new scale showed very good discriminating ability between healthy persons and the different patient groups (p<0.001; ROC 0.85–0.95), as well as showing that pain patients had better scores than patients with psychoses. The new Posture domain was overall better than GPE-52 and as good as CBE regarding discriminative ability, but with half the number of items.