INTRODUCTION: The Modified Sphygmomanometer Test (MST) has potential for wide clinical applications for the assessment of muscular strength. OBJECTIVE: To perform a literature review to describe how the MST has been employed for the evaluation of strength and its psychometric properties. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An extensive search was performed with the MEDLINE, SciELO, LILACS, and PEDro databases, by combining specific keywords, without language restrictions, and published until November/2011, followed by active manual search. RESULTS: Out of the 24 included studies, 11 investigated criterion-related validity and reliability with adequate results. The MST has been applied for the evaluation of strength in different populations, such as children, adults, and elderly, healthy or with some health conditions, been the rheumatic diseases and low back pain the most common. It has been applied for the assessment of trunk and limb muscles, mainly for the upper limb muscles (76.19%), principally handgrip. All of the studies performed some adaptations in the equipment and the majority used 5s of contraction, equipment pre-inflation of 20 mmHg. None reported the resting time neither the number of trials. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: Despite the clinical applicability of the MST and the adequate psychometric properties, this test is still little used for the evaluation of strength and was not applied in subjects with important strength impairments. The lack of standardization and/or description of the adopted procedures hinder the MST replication in clinical contexts.
Assessment; Muscular strength; Review
