• Tara L Packham, Claude J Spicher, Joy C MacDermid, and Norman D Buckley.
• Regional Rehabilitation Program, Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
• Pain Med. 2020 Jan 1; 21 (1): 101-108.

ObjectiveThere is a need for reliable and valid clinical assessment tools for quantifying allodynia in neuropathic pain. Allodynography has been proposed as a useful standardized procedure for clinical assessment of mechanical allodynia. This study (www.clinicaltrials.gov NCT02070367) undertook preliminary investigation of the measurement properties of allodynography, a new standardized clinical examination procedure for mapping the area of cutaneous allodynia.MethodsPersons with pain in one upper extremity after complex regional pain syndrome, a peripheral nerve injury, or who had recently experienced a hand fracture were recruited for assessment of static mechanical allodynia (based on perception of a 15g force stimulus delivered by Semmes-Weinstein monofilament #5.18 as painful) by two raters at baseline; the assessment was repeated one week later.ResultsSingle-measures estimates suggested inter-rater reliability for allodynography was excellent at an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.97 (N = 12); test-retest reliability was also excellent at ICC = 0.89 (N = 10) for allodynography (P < 0.001 for both). Confidence intervals' lower bounds confirm inter-rater reliability as excellent (0.90) but were less definitive for test-retest (0.59).ConclusionsThis preliminary study supports the inter-rater and test-retest reliability of allodynography. Studies on larger samples in multiple contexts and reporting other measurement properties are warranted.© 2019 American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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