The purpose of this study is to assess the validity of the Medical Symptoms Questionnaire (MSQ) as a clinical and research tool to track patient assessed well being and progress over the course of treatment in a multidisciplinary clinical setting. The MSQ has been found to be practical and useful by functional medical practitioners. Because it is not a validated tool, we have designed a research project to establish the validity beyond internal use with the intent of both refining the MSQ as a clinical tool and using the data collected for future publication of this data.

Clinicians will be asked to track their patients progress with both the DYNA SF 36, a validated tool for patient self assessed generic quality of life (QOL), and concurrently fill out an MSQ.

Once a sufficient amount of data has been collected (preferably 30 complete DYNA’s and contemporaneous MSQ’s), presumptively three DYNA’s and MSQ’s over a six month period, the data will be collated as reviewed.
We expect to see a correlation between DYNA scores and MSQ scores, as they measure associated phenomena. As DYNA scores increase, we expect to see a drop in MSQ scores over the same period of time.

In addition to this study, and independent statistical reliability study will be done on MSQ’s alone. The design of this study is to gather data on the short term statistical reliability of the MSQ. We will ask patients to take an MSQ and then to repeat the MSQ within 24 hours. This will allow us to run several well established statistical analytical tools to establish a base line reliability for the MSQ. This is a short term study that will be carried out internally and done in collaboration with the Minnenger Department of Psychology at Baylor College of Medicine.
This will act as an internal validation of the MSQ as a reliable clinical and research tool.
This project is currently in progress and it our intention to publish our findings about the reliability of this survey.

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