Measuring upper limb disability in non-specific neck pain : a clinical performance measure

Clinically it is common for patients with non-specific neck pain to report problems with upper limb function. Yet the extent of upper limb deficits in patients with neck pain is not well known and there are few measures available to clinicians to help quantify upper limb capacity in patients with neck pain. This paper synthesises and presents the findings of several studies which attempt to quantify the extent of upper limb disability in patients with non-specific neck pain and describes the development, validation and limitations of the Single Arm Military Press (SAMP) test. The SAMP test is an easy to conduct, brief, economical, performance based measure of upper limb disability which may prove beneficial for use in clinical practice in different cultural or socioeconomic communities, though further validation is required to confirm this.