FROM BMC MUSCULOSKELETAL DISORDERS
Austrian researchers have developed and validated a new five-question self-assessment survey for psoriatic arthritis patients to monitor their disease activity, according to a report published online in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.
The Stockerau Activity Score for Psoriatic Arthritis (SASPA) was developed by the team responsible for the Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease Activity Index (RADAI-5) and is similar to it. Using a variety of statistical tests, Dr. Burkhard F. Leeb of the Karl Landsteiner Institute for Clinical Rheumatology in Stockerau, Austria, and his colleagues demonstrated SASPA’s reliability, convergent validity, and sensitivity to change in 152 adult psoriatic arthritis outpatients. For example, they found a Cronbach’s alpha for SASPA of 0.875, indicating high internal consistency and reliability (BMC Musculoskelet. Disord. 2015;16:73).
There are several psoriatic arthritis assessment tools already that work for between-group comparisons but “may not be fully suitable for assessing individual patients,” the investigators wrote.
With SASPA, however, they noted that “inter-physician, but also intra-physician variations in assessing joints or global disease activity are eliminated, and other pitfalls of joint counts are avoided.”
The study was supported by the Karl Landsteiner Institute for Clinical Rheumatology. The authors said that they had no financial disclosures.
