Dear Susana,

I guess you won't find these information in the literature. Probably the best way to describe a clinically meaningful change would be to determine the MCID (minimal clinically important difference) based on your results using a distribution-based approach. Also see Copay et al. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17448732

Moreover, the SportScience website by Hopkins & Batterham is a great source as well to determine clinically meaningful changes: "Making Meaningful Inferences About Magnitudes" http://www.sportsci.org/resource/stats/index.html.

Hope this helps - good luck!

Kind regards,

Carsten

Susana,

Unfortunately I do not have a reference for you either. I have one suggestion in addition to those of Dr. Müller which may assist you in reporting your data, or at least putting it into context of a clinically meaningful result if you are unable to utilize the distribution-based approach.

Have you collected any measures that do have established MCID values? I have run into a similar issue with my research and population of interest and I haven’t been able to come across established MCIDs for our postural sway (time-to-boundary) and/or SEBT performance (the closest I can find is minimal detectable change). However, I often collect patient reported outcomes such as validated self-assessed disability questionnaires with reported MCIDs in our population.

Based on the reported MDC reported by Munro & Herrington, the SDD in Table 2 for normalized scores or Table 3 for reach distance in cm (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21055706), you could identify which participants exceeded both the MDC for SEBT and an established MCID for another measure. Then simply report the proportion of participants that had a meaningful response to your pilates intervention based on a change in SEBT and another measure. The MDC may differ for your postural sway measure if multiple researchers have conducted reliability studies, so I would suggest being conservative and utilizing the higher MDC values that are reported.

This two-step approach would help frame your results to both clinicians and researchers, however if you did not collect a dependent variable with an established MCID, you could always attempt to establish one on your own (Dr. Müller’s route) or frame your results based on the participants that exceeded the MDC and acknowledging that it may not truly be a clinically significant change.

Best,

Chris