Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Clinical Scales for Headache Disorders, PINAR YALINAY DİKMEN,AYNUR ÖZGE, Editör, Springer Nature, Zürich, ss.23-43, 2023
Clinical scales help clinicians and researchers as useful tools of diagnosis and management for headache disorders to improve efficiency and the time limitations required for a patient’s evaluation. These instruments could also have an important role in longitudinal care as well as a measurement of treatment outcomes when applied with scrutiny. Clinical scales are composite tools, aiming to measure different kinds of conditions such as screening or assessing the severity of a disease, evaluating health-related quality of life, associated features with pain, characteristics of pain, comorbid conditions (e.g. stress, depression, anxiety), clinical outcomes and health-care burdens, all of which are usually hard to measure quantitatively.
Measurement has critical importance in research for headache disorders as those in other scientific disciplines. For that reason, “reliable” and “valid” measures are needed. A clinical scale should be proved for its reliability and validity with studies before its utilization in clinical or research setting. Reliability simply evaluates that a test is measuring something in a reproducible fashion. To resolve that issue the test measuring what was intended requires some evidence of ‘validity’. A demonstration of validity needs more than peer judgments; some sort of empirical evidence must be produced to show that the tool is measuring what is intended.