Teaching program for the Movement Disorder Society-sponsored revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale: (MDS-UPDRS)

Abstract

To accompany the newly developed Movement Disorder Society revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), we developed a teaching program. The DVD-based program covers the four parts of the scale with visual and verbal instructions for uniform application. For the motor section (Part III), all items except rigidity are shown with an example of each rating option (0-4) as agreed upon by a panel of experts. The rate of agreement for the selected samples was always significant, with Kendall's coefficient of concordance W ranging between 0.99 and 0.72. The teaching program also provides a full patient examination with rating answers provided and four full MDS-UPDRS cases for a Certificate Program exercise of Part III. This training program is in English, but as non-English official translations of the MDS-UPDRS are developed, the program can be potentially modified into different languages.