Validation Of The Hungarian Mds-Updrs: Why Do We Need A New Parkinson Scale?

Background The Movement Disorder Society-sponsored revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) has been published in 2008 as the successor of the original UPDRS. The MDS-UPDRS organizing team developed guidelines for the development of official non-English translations consisting of four steps: translation/back-translation, cognitive pretesting, large field testing, and clinimetric analysis. The aim of this paper was to introduce the new MDS-UPDRS and its validation process into Hungarian.Methods Two independent groups of neurologists translated the text of the MDS-UPDRS into Hungarian and subsequently back-translated into English. After the review of the back-translated English version by the MDS-UPDRS translation administration team, cognitive pretesting was conducted with ten patients. Based on the results of the initial cognitive pretesting, another round was conducted. For the large field testing phase, the Hungarian official working draft version of MDS-UPDRS was tested with 357 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) determined whether the factor structure for the English-language MDS-UPDRS could be confirmed in data collected using the Hungarian Official Draft Version. To become an official translation, the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) had to be >= 0.90 compared to the English-language version.Results For all four parts of the Hungarian MDS-UPDRS, the CFI was >= 0.94.Conclusion The overall factor structure of the Hungarian version was consistent with that of the English version based on the high CFIs for all the four parts of the MDS-UPDRS in the CFA; therefore, this version was designated as the 'OFFICIAL HUNGARIAN VERSION OF THE MDS-UPDRS.'