Measurement scales for OA

Once OA has been diagnosed, doctors need to assess the severity of the disease. They often do this by asking a series of questions, or asking patients to fill out questionnaires, about:

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Pain: Patients are asked to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5, where the lowest number indicates "no pain" and the highest indicates "excruciating."

Movement: Patients rate how easy or how difficult it is to move a limb or a joint, and to indicate how far they can move the joint. Sometimes this, too, is measured on a scale of numbers. Patients also can be asked to look at a simple diagram of the body and mark the areas they think are affected.

Function: Patients answer questions about such daily activities as walking, cooking, sitting, playing with their children, and sleeping, indicating how severely they are impaired.

Patients filling out a survey might, for example, rate themselves on a five-point scale in several categories, after which scores are converted to a 0 to 100 scale on which 100 represents the best results. Taken at intervals, such measurements can also give physicians a sense of how well treatments are working.