Association of Hand Performance with Neck Disability in Text Neck Syndrome among College Students

Abstract

Objective – To study the association between neck pain, neck disability and hand performance in text necksyndrome among college studentsMethodology – A correlation study was done on 60 college students. Subjects having history of shoulder orneck pathology, musculoskeletal disease or anomaly, history of surgery of spine, history of surgery of neckor shoulder, recent surgery, chronic medical illness were excluded. Detailed assessment form was filled bythe subjects regarding name, age, dominant hand, duration of hours spent on mobile phone, visual analogscale, etc. along with Neck disability index. Later, their hand performance was checked using Jebsen TaylorHand Function test for both non dominant and dominant hand.Result - The data was not normally distributed so Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to assess thecorrelation between neck disability index and hand function test. Results were found to be statisticallysignificant at 5% level. “r” value was calculated between NDI and all the seven tasks of JTHFT for both Nondominant and dominant hand’s function separately. With regard to hand dominance, this study revealed thatwhole population wrote faster with dominant hand as compared to non dominant hand.Conclusion - This study provides evidence that hand dominance has an important role as it can affect handfunctioning. Especially high-level fine dexterity activities can be altered with prolonged texting.