Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Assessment Questionnaire (ALSAQ)

Background

The available treatments for ALS / MND are not curative and the purpose of interventions is to improve quality of life and increase survival.

The research and subsequent development of the ALSAQ PRO was supported by the UK’s Motor Neurone Disease Association.

The ALSAQ is a disease-specific PRO designed and developed for use in assessing areas of importance to patients with ALS / MND, and enables the most effective assessment of these patients because it:

• is brief and easy to complete so benefits from an excellent response rate,
• is available in long form (ALSAQ-40) and short form (ALSAQ-5),
• has undergone rigorous testing for validity, reliability and sensitivity to change and has been shown to a robust tool for assessing ALS / MND,
• can be employed in surveys or clinical trials for ALS / MND patient groups,
• benefits from easy to interpret scores.

The PROs

ALSAQ-40

There are 40 items / questions in the long form amyotrophic lateral sclerosis PRO, the ALSAQ-40, with 5 discrete scales:

• physical mobility (10 items)
• activities of daily living and independence (10 items)
• eating and drinking (3 items)
• communication (7 items)
• emotional reactions (10 items)

Patients are asked to think about the difficulties they may have experienced during the last two weeks (e.g. I have found it difficult to feed myself). Patients are asked to indicate the frequency of each event by selecting one of 5 options (Likert scale):
never/rarely/sometimes/often/always or cannot do at all.

ALSAQ-5

Despite the relative shortness of the 40 point ALSAQ there are certain situations where a shorter form of the instrument may be desirable. For these reasons the developers have created the 5 item, ALSAQ–5 which provides a brief assessment of the impacts of ALS/MND upon patients. Results from the use of ALSAQ–5 have been shown to closely reflect results from the longer form, ALSAQ–40.