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As the leading resource for peer-reviewed State-of-the-Science information on Spinal Cord Injury and Disease, Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation (TSCIR) is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study and dissemination of practical and theoretical information related to the subject of Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation.
TSCIR ANNOUNCEMENTS:
November, 2024 • Call for Papers!
Special issue on:
Evidence-based Recommendations for Exercise-Intervention studies involving people with Spinal Cord Injury
Guest Editors: Kathleen Martin Ginis, Matteo Ponzano, Mark Nash
Manuscripts due by July 8, 2025
TSCIR Submission Details
The number of published exercise trials in people living with spinal cord injury (PwSCI) has grown exponentially over the past five decades. However, the trials often have methodological limitations, which affect the quality and the clinical relevance of the research. For instance, a systematic review of 211 exercise studies involving PwSCI detected serious or very serious risk of bias for all outcomes of interest (i.e., cardiorespiratory fitness, power output, muscle strength, cardiovascular disease, and bone health). Such potential for bias negatively affects the certainty of the evidence of exercise-intervention research with PwSCI and the confidence with which clinicians and scientists can make recommendations about using exercise to improve health outcomes in PwSCI.
Recently, an international team of authors used a consensus-based process to formulate a set of 33 recommendations for conducting exercise-intervention research involving PwSCI1[1]. The recommendations can be found here.
The recommendations address elements such as participant recruitment, outcome measurement, exercise intervention prescription and delivery, supporting adherence to the intervention, fidelity of the delivery of the intervention, and monitoring and reporting adverse events. It is expected that adopting these recommendations will increase the quality and the overall certainty of the evidence regarding the effects of exercise on health outcomes in PwSCI.
The purpose of this special issue is to provide detailed guidance on how to follow the recommendations. For example, the recommendations outline what should be measured in exercise trials, but they do not explain how to conduct these assessments; the recommendations advise meaningfully engaging people with SCI in the design of studies, but do not explain how to do this effectively. We invite papers to this special issue that address these, and other questions of how to conduct high-quality SCI exercise research in a manner that aligns with the newly developed recommendations.
Some examples of topics might include papers that:
– present new methods for conducting fitness and other outcome assessments in field settings
– address reliability and validity of outcome measures in people with SCI
– valuate approaches for assessing implementation of research protocols
– test methods for improving adherence and retention in exercise trials
– discuss strategies for meaningful engagement of people with lived experience of SCI in the research process and research co-production
– describe innovative quantitative and qualitative methodologies that will improve the quality of exercise trials involving people with SCI
Submission Timeline: We ask that authors submit manuscripts by July 8, 2025.
Important Submission Notes
If you are submitting to the special issue on Evidence-based Recommendations for Exercise-Intervention studies involving people with Spinal Cord Injury please include a cover letter that outlines which aspects of the Recommendations are addressed in your paper, and how your paper meets the focus of this special issue: how to conduct high-quality SCI exercise research in a manner that aligns with the newly developed recommendations. Papers that do not meet the call, will not be considered for the special issue
Direct all inquiries and letters of intent to TSCIR’s office: TSCIR_editor@asia-spinalinjury.org
