Scaling Back on Scales with a Scale of Scales

摘要

An ever-increasing number of articles are published introducing clinical scales to describe neurovascular diseases. Unfortunately, unless you are some kind of idiot savant, there are now too many scales to remember. It would be helpful to have some way of knowing which scales are worth remembering and which are not. Most would agree that those worth remembering are those that are useful. A scale may be useful in a number of ways: First, it might allow us to predict outcomes for patients in our practice. Predicting outcomes helps us to counsel patients and choose the best therapy. Second, a scale might be useful if it can be used in clinical trials to objectively select patients to enroll or to provide objective descriptions of patient outcomes. For any scale to be useful for these purposes, however, it needs to be clinically relevant, valid, and easy to use. Unfortunately, many scales being published currently lack 1 or more of these qualities and are, therefore, not useful in the world of real patients. Thus, we propose a Scale of Scales to help you decide which are worth remembering and which are not (Table).