Introduction

A significant percentage of wheelchair users experience shoulder or wrist pain and injury over the course of a lifetime.  Often this pain interferes with their ability to complete necessary every day activities, including dressing, bathing, transfers, and mobility.  For many, such pain compromises their independence and reduces their quality of life. The Collaboration on Upper Limb Pain in Spinal Cord Injury (CULP-SCI) represents an ambitious multi-site attempt to quantify the development of upper extremity pain in manual wheelchair users.  Short term goals include understanding the biomechanical mechanisms that contribute to the development of upper limb pain among individuals with paraplegia and to determine subject and wheelchair characteristics associated with pain.  By understanding what contributes to the development of upper extremity pain, we can develop interventions to reduce the development of pain and injury and the subsequent secondary disability. 

The protocols on this web site represent a substantial amount of work completed at the University of Pittsburgh as well as at our collaborative centers: the University of Washington and the Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research and Education Corporation. If you are not at one of these centers and would like access to this web site, please send a request to Rosemarie Cooper at: cooperrm@pitt.edu

Thanks,

Michael Boninger, M.D.

Principle Investigator