Tandem gait test-retest reliability among healthy physically active young adults

Background: A tandem gait assessment is recommended after concussion. There is limited research examining psychometric properties of tandem gait assessments.

Objective: To determine tandem gait test intertrial and 1-week test-retest reliability. It was hypothesized that the tandem gait test would yield moderate to good reliability, times would improve across trials/sessions, and average scores would have higher reliability.

Design: Reliability study.

Setting: Research laboratory.

Interventions: Sixty participants (36 females, age: 20.4 ± 1.8 years) completed 10 tandem gait test trials on two occasions.

Main outcome measures: Dependent variables included number of normal trials (participants stayed on the line, heel and toe touched on every step, and they avoided touching an examiner/object) and times for each trial. We analyzed intertrial reliability using a one-way analysis of covariance and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), and test-retest reliability using dependent samples t-tests and ICCs.

Results: At the first testing session, there were significant differences in times across seven trials (F_2.44,80.42 = 21.55, p < .001). All trials were faster than the first trial. The second, third, and fifth trial were faster than the previous trial. There was moderately high overall reliability across the first seven trials (ICC_2,1 = 0.77, 95% confidence interval = 0.63, 0.87). All times were faster at the second testing session (compared to the first). Most outcomes for the 1-week test-retest reliability demonstrated at least moderate reliability, including the best times for the first three, four, and five trials; average times for the first four and five trials; and best and average times for all of the participants' normal trials during five and 10 attempted trials.

Conclusions: There are practice effects when administering multiple tandem gait test trials, but scores stabilize after the fifth trial. There are practice effects associated with multiple administrations of the tandem gait test, but outcomes using times for four or five trials have adequate 1-week test-retest reliability in healthy physically active young adults.