Patient-Reported Outcome of Physical Therapy in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: Observational Online Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Physical therapy is an essential component of multidisciplinary treatment in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, the meaning of physical therapy beside preservation of muscular strength and functional maintenance is not fully understood. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine patients' perception of physical therapy during symptom progression using an internet assessment approach. METHODS: A prospective, longitudinal, observational study was performed. Recruitment took place in an ALS center in Berlin, Germany. Online self-assessment was established on a case management platform over 6 months. Participants self-assessed the progression of the disease with the ALS Functional Rating Scale-Revised (ALSFRS-R) and tracked the efficacy of targeted physical therapy using Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile (MYMOP). We used the net promoter score (NPS) to inquire into recommendation levels of physical therapy. RESULTS: Forty-five participants with ALS were included in the study. Twenty-seven (60.0%) started the online assessment. The mean duration of physical therapy sessions per week was 142.7 minutes (SD 60.4) with a mean frequency of 2.9 (SD 1.2) per week. As defined by MYMOP input, the most concerning symptoms were reported in the legs (62.2%), arms (31.1%), and less frequently in the torso (6.7%). As expected for a progressive disease, there was a functional decline of 3 points in the ALSFRS-R at the end of the observation period (n=20). Furthermore, the MYMOP showed a significant loss of 0.8 in the composite score, 0.9 in the activity score and 0.8 in the targeted symptom. In spite of functional decline, the recommendation for physical therapy jumped from a baseline value of 20 NPS points to a very high 50 points at the end of study (P=.05). CONCLUSIONS: Physical therapy is perceived as an important treatment method by patients with ALS. Despite functional deterioration, patients are satisfied with physical therapy and recommend this intervention. The results also underline how the meaning of physical therapy changes throughout the disease. Physical therapy in ALS has to be regarded as a supportive and palliative health care intervention beyond functional outcome parameters.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".