Prevalence of patient-reported dysphagia in multiple sclerosis patients: An Italian multicenter study (using the DYMUS questionnaire)☆

Abstract Objective Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (CNS) with a chronic course. Dysphagia represents one of the current challenges in clinical practice for the management of MS patients. Dysphagia starts to appear in mildly impaired MS subjects (EDSS 2–3) and becomes increasingly common in the most severely disabled subjects (EDSS 8–9). The aim of the present study was to evaluate the frequency and characteristics of patient-reported dysphagia in MS patients with a multicenter study using the recently developed DYMUS (DYsphagia in MUltiple Sclerosis) questionnaire. Design Data were collected in a multi-centre, cross-sectional study using a face-to-face structured questionnaire for clinical characteristics and the DYMUS questionnaire. Results 1875 patients were interviewed. The current study has shown a correlation between patient-reported dysphagia and EDSS and disease course but not with age, gender and disease duration. Questionnaires were divided into “patient-reported dysphagia–yes” (587, 31.3%) and “patient-reported dysphagia–no” (1288, 68.7%). Compared with the patient-reported dysphagia–no group, patients in patient-reported dysphagia–yes group had higher EDSS score (mean EDSS 4.6 vs. 2.8; p p Conclusions This study represents the largest, multi-centre sample of MS patients evaluated for patient-reported dysphagia utilizing an ad-hoc questionnaire for this condition.