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A review of the assessment of dyskinesias.

Dyskinesias are most prevalent in patients with Huntington's disease (HD),
patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) who have received chronic levodopa
therapy, and in patients who have been treated with neuroleptics (tardive
dyskinesia ITD]).

Recent therapeutic developments have fueled a growing interest in the
clinimetrics of dyskinesias.

For dyskinesias in HD, few rating scales are available, but data on
validity, reliability, and responsiveness are scarce.

Only the interrater reliability of facial dyskinesias has been evaluated
and found to be low.

Many subjective rating scales for dyskinesias in PD exist, but only the
Dyskinesia Rating Scale has undergone sufficient clinimetric evaluation.

For TD, numerous rating scales are available, many of them with ample data
on reliability and validity.

Objective assessment of dyskinesias has been attempted with a number of
techniques.

All these methods require a laboratory setting, rendering them susceptible
to influence of stress.

Moreover, they provide only a momentary assessment of dyskinesia severity
and fail to take into account diurnal fluctuations.

In view of the methodologic shortcomings in the assessment of dyskinesias,
more effort needs to be put into strengthening currently available modes of
assessment or designing new ones.

In the future ambulatory accelerometry might prove to be of value in this
field.


Mov Disord 1999 Sep;14(5):737-43
Hoff JI, van Hilten BJ, Roos RA
Department of Neurology, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands.
PMID: 10495034, UI: 99423225

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/>

janet paterson
52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset
613 256 8340 po box 171 almonte ontario canada K0A 1A0
a new voice: <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/6263/>
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