Burglarized

So while I played football this morning on the field where a plane had to emergency land the other day... Someone broke into the trunk of my mother's car, which was parked at the field's lot, and they took my credit cards, cash, and iPod. BOO! But it did lead me to learn this about that field I play on from a post about the field on a website...
"You know I didn't realize that the reason that park is there in the first place is because of the verrazano bridge...the builders of the bridge needed a place to dump all the displaced dirt from its construction, and ended up creating a new hunk of land that jutted out of brooklyn into coney island creek. That land later became part of a city park. I thought that was a cool piece of neighborhood trivia."
Needless to say, filing police reports and trying to do a little detective work myself took up the majority of my day, thus not allowing me to do as much cramming as I would have liked before tomorrows Neuro Midterm... I then decided to drink a Tab to give me study power (wanted to try something other than RedBull, even though I just found it they market Tab towards women... eh).

Whilst I drove around and finished up some work for my mother I was on the phone with some very helpful classmates, having review sessions over the phone. Very helpful, considering I would have been very counterproductive otherwise...

So here are some of the scales that are used to assess some of the patients that present with various Neuro conditions:

1. Kurtzke Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) - This measures disability associated with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Scored from 0.0-10.0, o.0 indicates a normal neurological exam. After 0.0 is 1.0 which is indicative of minimal signs in one Functional System (FS), after that the scores increase by 0.5 all the way up to 10.0 which is death due to MS. There are 7 FS's that are scored from 0-9 and the totals of these systems are the score for the EDSS.
2. Rivermead Visual Gait Assessment form (link is to the original journal article introducing the form into the literature) - While gait assessment is something we as PT's do very often (even when we walk down the street and watch other people walk), this scale quantifies each aspect of what we see. The scale looks at Upper Limb Position (shoulder and elbow flexion), Stance Phase (11 different items), Swing Phase (7 items), and finally any other deviations noted. Each item gets scored as such: 0=normal, 1=mild, 2=moderate, 3=severe. The highest possible score is a 59, and the closer to this score you get, the more deviation there is in the subjects gait.
3. Modified Fatigue Impact Scale (MFIS) - The MFIS is a structured, self-report questionnaire that the patient can generally complete with little or no intervention from an interviewer. It has 21 items that follow the phrase "Because of my fatigue during the past 4 weeks..." and each item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0(never)-4(almost always). The scoring for the questionnaire is broken down into physical, cognitive, and psychosocial subscales (each subscale totals specific items together). The total MFIS score is the total of the three subscales and can range from 0-84. Higher scores are indicative of "fatigue".
4. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Functional Rating Scale-Revised - ALS is more commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease (I love the kidshealth website). Lou Gehrig was a great New York Yankee baseball player, he made the famous "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth" speech. This scale consists of 12 total items with a score of 4(normal)-0(loss of respective item). The range would then be 48-0, the higher the score the better off the subject is. The ALSFRS-R is an attractive primary outcome measure in clinical trials of ALS because it is validated, easy to administer, minimizes dropout, reduces cost, and correlates with survival. Unlike the other standard outcome measures currently employed, the ALSFRS-R is also a measure of global function.