This article and any supplementary material should be cited as follows: Moloney NA, Hall TM, Doody CM. Reliability of thermal quantitative sensory testing:

This article and any supplementary material should be cited as follows: Moloney NA, Hall TM, Doody CM. Reliability of thermal quantitative sensory testing: A systematic review. J Rehabil Res Dev. 2012;49(2):191–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1682/JRRD.2011.03.0044

Slideshow ProjectDOI:10.1682/JRRD.2011.03.0044JSP

Reliability of thermal quantitative sensory testing: A systematic review

Niamh A. Moloney, MSc; Toby M. Hall, PhD; Catherine M. Doody, PhD



• Aim– Systematically review literature to determine

reliability of thermal quantitative sensory testing (QST).

• Relevance– Further understand pain mechanisms.– Aid development or application of more

appropriate interventions.



Methods

• Used key words to search medical databases for relevant articles (Jan 1990–May 2010).

• Assessed article quality with Quality Appraisal for Reliability Studies (QAREL) checklist.

• Extracted and assessed specific data on: • Type of study.• Sample and raters.• Methodological issues.• Statistical analysis.• Results.



QAREL Checklist

High quality study = “yes” score on at least 50% of relevant checklist items.



Results

• Reviewed 21 total articles.– 5 illustrated high quality based on QAREL checklist.

• Summary– Fair reliability:

• Cold detection threshold. • Warm detection threshold.

– Fair to good: • Cold pain threshold.• Heat pain threshold.



Conclusions

• Reliability of thermal QST varied considerably.

• Large variation in statistical methods used to analyze data in articles, which limited ability to perform meta-analysis.

• Research investigating reliability of thermal QST should adhere to more rigorous guidelines.

Documents

This article and any supplementary material should be cited as follows: Moloney NA, Hall TM, Doody CM. Reliability of thermal quantitative sensory testing: