A new questionnaire is available to assess women with pelvic girdle pain.

Pregnancy related pelvic girdle pain is a considerable issue for women that creates significant loss of function. An update on pelvic girdle dysfunction from Kanakaris et alcan be found here by opening the link to the free full access text to the right of the Pubmed abstract. They report that the incidence of pregnancy pelvic girdle pain ranges from 4-76% in the literature depending on the definition utilized.

Britt Stuge, PhD, PT, of Norway and colleagues recently published an article in the Physical Therapy Journal. The article includes a new tool that physical therapists can utilize to assess function in female patients who have pelvic girdle pain.

The tool is called the "PGP" for "pelvic girdle pain" and was designed for use in the pregnancy and post-partum period.20 of the questions refer specifically to activities and 5 questions are about symptoms. This is a rather specific tool and it was designed for use in the clinic or for research.

You can access this tool on the Herman Wallace website and you can use it in your practice. This is very valuable to therapists as not all tools can be used freely in the clinic or in research without specific permissions or fees paid.