To determine the perceived difficulty in dealing with consequences of spinal cord injury (SCI) and to explore patterns of how these complications are perceived.
Postal survey.
General community.
Individuals with traumatic SCI (n = 430).
Subjects (n = 877) were selected from The Miami Project database and were sent a questionnaire in which they were asked to rate their difficulty in dealing with 10 consequences of SCI, on a scale ranging from 0 (not hard at all) to 10 (extremely hard).
The questionnaire was returned by 430 individuals (49%). Five consequences (decreased ability to walk or move, decreased control of bowel, decreased control of bladder, decreased sexual function, and pain) were rated highest (means, 8.2 to 6.2). High ratings of feeling sad were associated with high ratings of most other consequences, and a cluster analysis revealed interrelationships between the ways the various consequences were perceived.
Several consequences of SCI are frequently perceived as being very difficult to deal with. Sadness may influence how well a person deals with other consequences of SCI. The observed patterns in perceived difficulty dealing with complications of SCI need to be explored further because they are important in our understanding and treatment of the medical conditions that may follow SCI.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 October 2025.
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#6,645,043
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Outputs from Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
#1,847
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#11,652
of 54,397 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
#8
of 32 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,400,738 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 80th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,774 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.7. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 32 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its contemporaries.
