Assessment of Global Fatigue in Multiple Sclerosis: A Spanish Language Version of the CGI and PGI Fatigue Scales 143
tools but to design a simple, reliable single item metric
that would be applicable for both clinicians and patients.
The PGI-S and CGI-S instruments that we have devel-
oped do provide a single item, overall impression that
assesses three distinct categories of fatigue related to
physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms. Both the
English and Spanish language versions offer detailed
descriptors of these three categories to facilitate symptom
identification and customized scoring anchors to facili-
tate accurate scoring.
We have now employed the CGI fatigue instrument in
American psychiatric patients (Major Depressive Disor-
der and schizophrenia) and healthy controls, and in a
second study of Latin patients with multiple sclerosis. In
each group, there was a high correlation between the
CGI-S and PGI-S as well as high correlations with the
MGH-CPFQ providing a validation of the instrument. In
both studies, the CGI-S and PGI-S were easily under-
stood and administered by both the clinic staff and con-
senting subjects. Consequently, we believe this instru-
ment can be a meaningful metric when app lied in a busy
clinic setting to reliably gauge symptoms of fatigue dis-
tinct from the specific CNS di sor de r bei n g tr eat ed.
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