Movement Disorder Society–Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Use in the Covid‐19 Era

With the Covid-19 pandemic and our limited ability to examine our Parkinson's disease patients in person, telemedicine and digital visits have become a necessary protective step to assure high-quality care and safe distancing. For movement disorder specialists, our usual reliance on the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) is compromised because rigidity cannot be assessed without touching the patient, and in most instances, postural reflexes cannot be safely performed without a trained health professional. As leaders of the MDS-UPDRS development program, we have been contacted in the past weeks by many colleagues asking how to record an ongoing MDS-UPDRS score in the context of such limitations and how to interpret resultant scores against prior prospectively collected longitudinal ratings of the same patient.