Healio: A 14-item self-reported scale improved the management of and provided guidance for narcolepsy type 1 among children and adolescents aged 10 to 18 years, according to study findings published in Neurology.
Researchers recently developed the Narcolepsy Severity Scale (NSS) and validated it among adults with narcolepsy type 1 (NT1). In the current study, they tailored this scale to pediatric populations.
“We now developed the pediatric Narcolepsy Severity Scale (NSS-P), a self-report questionnaire, designed to measure the frequency, severity and consequences of the five key NT1 symptoms in children and adolescents,” Lucie Barateau, MD, PhD, of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Unit in the department of neurology at the Gui-de-Chauliac Hospital in France, and colleagues wrote. “The aims of this study were: (1) to assess NSS-P psychometric properties, validity and reliability, and (2) to evaluate its responsiveness to treatment in a well-characterized sample of children and adolescents with NT1 from two Reference Centers for Narcolepsy in France.”
Results showed adequate psychometric properties with significant item-total score correlations for the NSS-P, as well as good reliability in a four-factor solution according to factor analysis.
