Validation Study of the Official Korean Version of the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale

The Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) is widely used for estimating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Translation and validation of the MDS-UPDRS is necessary for non-English speaking countries and regions. The aim of this study was to validate the Korean version of the MDS-UPDRS.

Altogether, 362 patients in 19 centers were recruited for this study. We translated the MDS-UPDRS to Korean using the translation-back translation method and cognitive pretesting. We performed both confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses to validate the scale. We calculated the comparative fit index (CFI) for confirmatory factor analysis, and used unweighted least squares for exploratory factor analysis.

The CFI was higher than 0.90 for all parts of the scale. Exploratory factor analysis also showed that the Korean MDS-UPDRS has the same number of factors in each part as the English version.

The Korean MDS-UPDRS has the same overall structure as the English MDS-UPDRS. Our translated scale can be designated as the official Korean MDS-UPDRS.