Have you ever been handed a questionnaire at the doctor’s office and wondered why and how it was relevant? Where does it go? Who has the time to read all of it? To say the least, I was quite skeptical at my pediatrician’s office last year when I was handed their new, mandatory “depression-anxiety questionnaire.”
When I asked my doctor about it, she understood my cynicism, but also told me how it actually was helping the office help a lot of these kids who would otherwise go under the radar.
It turns out that these questionnaires are much more significant than meets the eye. Researchers just found that a patient questionnaire for multiple sclerosis patients is effective in predicting clinical outcomes.
More specifically, and importantly, there is evidence that this questionnaire can likely predict survival among these MS patients.
In this study, the questionnaire given out was called the Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale-29; this was a 29-question survey evaluating quality of life and disease impact over the previous two weeks.
Joel Raffel, a researcher in the study describes its importance:
“We hope that using patient-reported outcomes like these more and more will mean a shift towards empowering patients. They will be able to provide their own data, so rather than the doctor telling the patient how they are doing, it’s the other way around.”
The questionnaire was initially given to 2,172 patients in the beginning of 2004. in 2005, 872 of these patients repeated it. 10 years later, in 2014, data was collected and it was concluded that the 264 from the original 2,172 (which makes 12.4% of the sample population) died.
This evaluation helped researchers draw the inference that patients’ Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale-29 (MSIS-29) scores correlated with 10-year mortality risk, regardless of extraneous factors (age, gender, disability, etc.). In fact, Patients with high scores on the MSIS-29 reported lower quality of life, and consequently were 5.7 times more likely to die within a decade than those patients who reported lower scores.
Raffel hopes that these questionnaires will be administered annually at a clinic or online, helping doctors to under the real issues that patients are going through, while answering questions about prognosis in general.
Overall, the whole team believes that this questionnaire is ultimately going to help doctors choose the best course of treatment for MS patients.
I guess those surveys aren’t so useless after all.
To read more about this fascinating new study in Multiple Sclerosis News Today, click here.
