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A patient self-rated 19-item wearing-off questionnaire (WOQ-19) was shown to be a potent screening tool for wearing-off (WO) in patients with Parkinson's disease. As part of the early detection of wearing-off in Parkinson's disease study, we preliminarily performed a linguistic and a psychometric validation of an Italian version of the WOQ-19. Moreover, we assessed the sensitivity and specificity of the WOQ-19 in the office-based settings. The psychometric validation study included assessment of discriminant ability, internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and the Cronbach's Alpha were assessed. The WOQ-19 sensitivity and specificity were calculated in respect to the physician assessment of WO, taken as the gold standard. The Italian version of WOQ-19 was found easy to understand by ≥80% of the patients. The number of WO-related symptoms detected by WOQ-19 was 7.5 ± 3.2 in patients with WO and 1.6 ± 2.6 in patients without WO ( p < 0.0001). Cronbach's alpha was equal to 0.868 for the total number of WO symptoms. The ICC value was equal to 0.858 for WO-related symptoms as a whole. The diagnostic ability study recruited 207 patients: for a WOQ-19 cut-off ≥2, the sensitivity was equal to 0.881 and the specificity was 0.674. This is the first validation of WOQ-19 in Italian, with excellent linguistic validity and psychometric properties. WOQ-19 was confirmed to be reliable in WO detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PRIAMO study is a cross-sectional longitudinal observational study aimed at describing epidemiology and evolution of non-motor symptoms (NMS) in patients with different forms of parkinsonism recruited in 55 Italian centres and evaluated over 24 months. In this paper, we are reporting prevalence and clinical characteristics of NMS in patients with atypical and secondary parkinsonism. Out of 1307 consecutive patients with a diagnosis of parkinsonism, 83 patients had vascular parkinsonism (VP), 34 had multiple system atrophy (MSA), 30 had progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), 14 had dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and 11 had corticobasal degeneration (CBD). MSA and DLB had the highest number of NMS domains and symptoms, respectively. Gastrointestinal symptoms, pain, urinary problems and postural instability due to orthostatic hypotension were most frequent in MSA. Sleep disturbances were also common with a prevalence of approximately 70% in all diagnostic groups but CBD (36%). Psychiatric symptoms and attention and memory impairment were frequently observed in all diagnoses but were most prevalent among DLB patients, whereas the prevalence of skin and respiratory disorders was rather low in all forms, ranging between 10 and 30%. Atypical parkinsonism patients also reported a low QoL, with no significant differences among the different forms, whereas PD and VP patients had a better QoL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]