Validation of the Polish version of the Movement Disorder Society Non-motor Rating Scale (MDS-NMS)

We aimed to translate and validate the Polish version of the MDS-NMS and compare it with the original English version.

Non-motor symptoms (NMS) affect a significant portion of the Parkinson's disease (PD) patient population and may negatively impact their quality of life. Non-motor symptoms may contribute to an increased sense of illness among patients and to a greater burden upon their caregivers. It is therefore advisable to develop a Polish validation of a reference scale for diagnosing and assessing the severity of NMS.

The MDS-NMS was translated into Polish by a third-party translation company experienced in the translation of rating scales and reviewed by the Polish Translation Validation Leader (JS). Following several rounds of review, the final translation received the approval of the MDS Translation Steering Committee for its use in Cognitive Pre-testing. The translated version of the MDS-NMS then underwent Cognitive Pre-testing, and the translation was subsequently modified based on the results. The approved version was considered to be the Official Working Document of the Polish MDS-NMS and was tested on 307 Polish PD patients recruited at movement disorder centers. Confirmatory and explanatory factor analyses were applied to determine whether the factor structure of the English version could be confirmed in the Polish version.

The overall factor structure of the Polish version was fairly consistent with that of the English version based on the high CFIs for all 14 subscales of the MDS-NMS in the confirmatory factor analysis (CFI ≥ 0.90). The Polish MDS-NMS was confirmed to share a common factor structure with the original English version.

The availability of the Polish validation of the MDS-NMS scale will facilitate Polish research centers' participation in multi-center trials and clinical studies. Moreover, it will enable individual Polish researchers to compare their results collected on Polish PD patients more easily and confidently with those available worldwide. We are also convinced that the Polish version of MDS-NMS will prove useful in everyday clinical practice, facilitating the easier and more effective identification of NMS-related problems and the assessment of their severity.