Table 1.

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria.

	Inclusion	Exclusion
Patients	Adults with acute or subacute traumatic spinal cord injury at any level Undergoing rehabilitation therapy ASIA grade A-D (or comparable)	Pediatric patients Pregnancy Cord compression due to tumor, hematoma, or degenerative disease ASIA E (or comparable) Nontraumatic etiology >40% Follow-up <70%
Intervention (KQ1 and 2)	KQ1: Earlier implementation of rehabilitation therapy KQ2: Different rehabilitation strategies	KQ2: neural prosthetics, cell therapy, spinal cord stimulators, speech/language therapy only, pharmacological therapy only, respiration/breathing therapy only
Comparison	KQ1: Delayed initiation of rehabilitation therapy KQ2: Different rehabilitation strategies
Predictive Factors (KQ3)	Patient characteristics (eg, age, sex, race, body mass index, marital status, education level, vocational status) Injury characteristics (eg, level, cause, and/or severity of injury; neurologic and functional status at admission; surgical stabilization)
Outcomes	Efficacy/effectiveness Neurologic outcomes (eg, ASIA, ASIA Impairment Scale) Functional outcome: patient- or physician-reported outcome (eg, Functional Independence Measure, functional performance) Muscle strength Safety Complications Mortality Rehospitalization Cost data Incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (or a similar cost-effectiveness metric comparing treatment costs and effectiveness)	Muscle/nerve activity (electromyography) Muscle/skeletal composition Physiological outcomes (VO2max, peak work, etc) KQ4: costs only, utilities only, differences in outcomes only
Study design	KQ1: Comparative studies comparing early with delayed initiation of rehabilitation therapy, controlling for injury severity KQ2: Comparative studies comparing different rehabilitation therapies, controlling for injury severity KQ3: Cohort studies assessing important predictors of outcomes following rehabilitation, while controlling for injury severity KQ4: full economic studies	In vitro biomechanical studies Animal studies Cadaveric studies Case series
Publication	Studies published or translated into English in peer-reviewed journals	Abstracts, editorials, letters Duplicate publications of the same study which do not report on different outcomes Single reports from multicenter trials White papers Narrative reviews Proceedings/abstracts from meetings Articles identified as preliminary reports when results are published in later versions

Abbreviations: ASIA, American Spinal Injury Association; KQ, key question.