NEW ORLEANS—Performance Scale Severity Score (PSSS) tables may allow patients and their physicians to easily compare functional impairment of a patient with multiple sclerosis (MS) to that of other patients with similar MS duration, according to research presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
“PSSS tables provide a snapshot of perceived disease impact on 11 neurologic domains across disease lifespan,” said Ilya Kister, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology at New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center, New York City, and colleagues.
“[The tables] could assist clinicians and patients in choosing the disease-modifying therapy commensurate with relative disease severity,” he added.
Scoring Domain-Specific Impairment The study’s reference population derives from the North American Research Committee on Multiple Sclerosis (NARCOMS) Registry, which collects self-reported data from 29,904 patients in 11 neurologic domains—cognition, depression, pain, fatigue, vision, hand function, mobility, spasticity, bowel/bladder, sensory, and tremor. A domain-specific, six- or seven-grade Performance Scale is used to score impairment in each of the domains.
For each of the 11 Performance Scales, Dr. Kister and his colleagues from the NYU School of Medicine and the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health calculated the percent of patients in each impairment grade for each of the first 30 years of disease.
More Headlines