Study Design. This study was a literature review of the quality of four disease-specific
functional status questionnaires for patients with low back pain: Oswestry; Million; Roland;
and Waddell disability questionnaire. Objectives. The questionnaires were evaluated in
terms of general description, scale structure, reliability, validity, responsiveness, and clinical
research applications. Summary of Background Data. Functional status is an outcome of
great interest for clinical trials of low back pain. Methods. A computer-aided search was …

For trials of back pain therapy and for many clinical purposes, the outcome of greatest
interest may be patient functioning. Physical measurements of muscle strength and range of
motion are only weakly correlated with actual patient behavior or symptoms, so the behavior
and symptoms must be measured directly. Commonly used physician ratings on ordinal
scales are often highly subjective and fail to distinguish particular activities which may
improve from those which do not. This paper briefly considers the pressures for improving …