Idio Scale Judgment: evaluation of a new method for estimating responder thresholds.

Area of Science:

• Health Outcomes Research
• Patient-Reported Outcomes
• Neurology

Background:

• Assessing meaningful change in patient-reported outcomes is crucial for evaluating treatment effectiveness in neurological conditions.
• Existing methods may not adequately capture the individual patient's perspective on what constitutes a significant change in symptoms like fatigue.

Purpose of the Study:

• To pilot the novel Idio Scale Judgment method for estimating patient-defined change thresholds in fatigue for individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Main Methods:

• An online survey of 500 MS patients assessed fatigue using the Neuro-QoL fatigue scale.
• Participants compared their own fatigue levels to presented scenarios (short form summaries) and judged them as representing the same, greater, or lesser fatigue.
• Distances between patient-reported fatigue and endorsed scenarios were used to estimate individual change thresholds.

Main Results:

• Mean individual change thresholds were calculated as -3.5 for improvement and 3.2 for worsening.
• The majority of participants (69%) provided logically consistent judgments.
• Inconsistent judgments showed weak associations with age, gender, and MS type, and moderate association with confidence ratings.

Conclusions:

• The Idio Scale Judgment method demonstrated strengths in contextualizing judgments within personally relevant consequences.
• The method is suitable for large-scale data collection, allowing for evaluation of judgment variability.
• Idio Scale Judgment shows significant promise as a new tool for estimating meaningful change thresholds in patient-reported outcomes.