Usefulness of Variations of the Timed Up and Go in Apparently Healthy Individuals.

The Timed Up and Go (TUG) assesses functional mobility. The clinical usefulness and interpretation of cutoff scores for the original TUG, however, is unclear with community ambulators. Adding a cognitive or manual task to the TUG or manipulating the test environment might better identify functional limitations in this population. The purpose of this study was to determine the usefulness of the TUG as a screening tool in apparently healthy individuals by examining the ability of one or more TUG variations to challenge these individuals. Young (n = 69, mean age = 25) and old subjects (n = 67, mean age = 78) performed the TUG and 7 variations in random order including combinations of cognitive and manual tasks and a compliant surface. Time on the TUG and accuracy of the cognitive task were analyzed using an ANOVA for repeated measures. All participants except two in the older group performed the TUG faster than the 20-second cutoff score. Older subjects were slower and less accurate than younger subjects. For younger subjects, post-hoc analysis revealed that 20 out of 28 pairings were significantly different. For older subjects, 19 out of 28 pairings were different. There was no difference in performance of the young subjects on the cognitive (10.05s) and manual tasks (10.27s). Older subjects took 18.8's to perform the cognitive TUG compared to 16.3s for the manual TUG. Unless clinicians assess patients under real world conditions, they may overestimate the ability of their patients to function independently. This study supports the idea that multi-tasking can be quantified. The battery may prove useful for discriminating patients whose performance falls in the grey zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]