The Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire and the Oswestry Disability Questionnaire

Condition-specific health status measures are commonly used as outcome measures in clinical trials and to assess patient progress in routine clinical practice. The expert panel that met to discuss this special issue of Spine recommended that, when possible, a condition-specific measure for back pain should be chosen from two widely used measures, the Poland-Morris Disability Questionnaire(106) (RDQ) or the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI).(30) These two measures have been used in a wide variety of situations over many years, and each is available in a number of languages. In this article, the authors describe these two instruments and provide evidence of their validity and reliability and some comparative results obtained with the use of the two questionnaires. The instruments themselves are included in the appendixes. When used in the forms reproduced in the appendixes, no permission is required from the authors or from Spine. Other back pain-specific health status measures are described by Kopec elsewhere in this edition of Spine.(67)