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On 8 Mar 00, at 1:30, Murray Charters wrote: > I think the "preferred" scale is yet another... UPDRS... > http://neurosurgery.mgh.harvard.edu/pdstages.htm I guess it's a matter of what is being measured and for what purpose. If you want a concise summary (how sick are you on a scale of 1 - 5) the Hoehn & Yahr is OK. If it's a matter of how much care is needed, then the various activities of daily living scales apply. If a rather detailed clinical picture is needed, then the UPDRS is appropriate. The UPDRS itself is not detailed enough on some measures, such as mental effects, for which there are other scales, and I think it omits a few important things altogether (fatigue, constipation). One application for which there is no good, standard scale of measurement is evaluation for disability insurance. As a result, the applicants and their doctors, in deciding whether to apply for disability and in supplying evidence of disablity, and the evaluators, in assessing disablity, in effect use or invent rather subjective measures. Lots of room for improvement here. Phil Tompkins Hoboken NJ age 62/dx 1990