Major goals of rehabilitation and health interventions in people with spinal cord injury (SCI) are to improve functional independence, increase social participation and enhance quality of life (QOL). Determining functional areas perceived by consumers as most important can assist in research prioritization, planning for delivery of health services and policy development. Five high priority areas of functioning for the SCI population (arm/hand use, walking, bladder/bowel control, sexual function and presence of pain) were chosen to determine the preferences for these five attributes. A discrete choice experiment was conducted involving 151 persons with SCI sampled from Australia and the United States of America. Consistent with prior research, arm/hand function had the highest preference with odds ratios of being 44-76% more likely to choose arm/hand function over the other four functions. Preference for normal arm/hand function was found to be significantly more preferred by the group with paraplegia compared with tetraplegia; that is, retaining and not trading-off existing arm/hand function for other improved functions. There were no significant differences found in preferences between bladder/bowel function and walking or elimination of pain, although walking was preferred in earlier (≤10) post injury years and pain amelioration became more important with a longer duration (>10 years) post-injury. Sexual function had the lowest preference when traded against the other four functions. Understanding the functional preferences of persons with SCI will help to inform future research design, as well as enable successful translation of research into practice and health policy, meeting the needs of people with SCI.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. 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 19 August 2025.
All research outputs
#9,301,000
of 29,077,267 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Neurotrauma
#1,209
of 2,974 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#109,459
of 317,024 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Neurotrauma
#22
of 59 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 29,077,267 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 67th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,974 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.5. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 58% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 317,024 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 59 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 62% of its contemporaries.
