Interesting points - thankyou. The final multiple choice section of the questionnaire is not of my own devising and I cannot alter it without losing comparaibility with other users of the same questionnaire. I agree that one of the fundamental problems of this instrument, which was originally devised by Drs Levine and Katz in Boston, is that it has never been clear how it was to be answered by a patient with two affected hands. The current forced answering of a full set of questions for each hand by the website is a solution to a statistical problem of needing hand specific answers but is not ideal. I think the Boston group now do the SSS scale once for each hand but the FSS just once for both hands together. I think most people settle on the solution of answering 'not a problem' for activities which they do not do with the hand in question.
One of the reasons for having the discussion forums is to give people a chance to qualify questionnaire answers but the IT is not yet good enough to interpret free text and to apply the mathematical approaches that we use to assess the probability of CTS we do have to have categorised answers.
The features which will have pulled your score down a bit are the lack of nocturnal symptoms (you answered the set of questions on the timing of symptoms indicating only symptoms first thing in the morning) and the lack of obvious risk factors - you are not overweight, have no family history, no diabetes etc - however 56% is actually quite a high score in our terms and I've also answered in the other forum regarding the issue of unsalvageability. JB
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Interesting points - thankyou. The final multiple choice section of the questionnaire is not of my own devising and I cannot alter it without losing comparaibility with other users of the same questionnaire. I agree that one of the fundamental problems of this instrument, which was originally devised by Drs Levine and Katz in Boston, is that it has never been clear how it was to be answered by a patient with two affected hands. The current forced answering of a full set of questions for each hand by the website is a solution to a statistical problem of needing hand specific answers but is not ideal. I think the Boston group now do the SSS scale once for each hand but the FSS just once for both hands together. I think most people settle on the solution of answering 'not a problem' for activities which they do not do with the hand in question.
One of the reasons for having the discussion forums is to give people a chance to qualify questionnaire answers but the IT is not yet good enough to interpret free text and to apply the mathematical approaches that we use to assess the probability of CTS we do have to have categorised answers.
The features which will have pulled your score down a bit are the lack of nocturnal symptoms (you answered the set of questions on the timing of symptoms indicating only symptoms first thing in the morning) and the lack of obvious risk factors - you are not overweight, have no family history, no diabetes etc - however 56% is actually quite a high score in our terms and I've also answered in the other forum regarding the issue of unsalvageability. JB