Evaluating differences between patient-reported measures and physician assessment has implications for developing specific treatment regimens. For a study, researchers sought to determine the relationship between health outcomes and self-reported motor-related function impairment vs. clinician-examined motor symptoms. The Parkinson’s Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI, N=420) and the PASADENA phase II clinical study (N=316) analyzed newly diagnosed Parkinson’s disease patients. They determined the average normalized difference between each participant’s MDS-UPDRS (Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale) part II and III MDS-UPDRS scores. Individuals with score disparities between the <25th or >75th percentiles were classified as low- and high-self-reporters (those between ranges were labeled intermediate-self-reporters). Using the Kruskal–Wallis nonparametric and Pearson’s χ2 tests, investigators examined various clinical/biomarker readouts among these three groups. For relationships between MDS-UPDRS subscales, Spearman’s correlations were used.
For most motor and nonmotor characteristics, high-self-reporters reported the highest impairment/symptom experience in both cohorts. However, these high-self-reporters were comparable to or less impaired. On MDS-UPDRS part IB, patient-reported nonmotor symptoms had the largest positive connection with self-reported motor-related impairment (PPMI rs= 0.54, PASADENA rs=0.52). This association outperformed the part II and clinician-examined MDS-UPDRS part III correlations (PPMI rs = 0.38, PASADENA rs = 0.28).
Self-reported motor-related impairments include motor signs/symptoms and nonmotor assessments. This might reflect either a direct influence of nonmotor symptoms on motor-related performance or the presence of general response patterns in how patients self-rated symptoms. The findings pointed to the need for more research into MDS-UPDRS II’s usefulness for assessing motor-related deficits.
Reference:movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.28884
