Neurologists use the MG-ADL score to track symptom severity and monitor how patients respond to treatment.
Because the questionnaire is quick to complete, it can easily be used during routine visits with your specialist.
Establishing a Baseline
Doctors often record an MG-ADL score when someone is first diagnosed or when a new treatment begins. This provides a baseline score that can be compared with future results.
“I usually recommend that patients start using the scale early in their disease journey or when they begin a new treatment. That gives you a good sense of where the symptoms are and allows you to capture change over time,” says Muppidi.
Looking for Changes Over Time
Repeating the questionnaire during follow-up visits helps doctors see whether symptoms are improving, worsening, or staying the same. Tracking changes over time is often more meaningful than focusing on a single score, says Muppidi.
Evaluating Treatment Changes
The MG-ADL score can help doctors assess whether a therapy is working.
Patient-reported scores also tend to align closely with physician assessments of disease severity, he says.
Defining Clinical Significance: The Two-Point Rule
In clinical studies, a two-point improvement in the MG-ADL score is considered a meaningful change and is often a standard to judge if a medication has effectively improved a symptom.
While this makes sense as an end point, Muppidi says that this benchmark isn’t something that most doctors use in the real world.
“In practice, it really depends on the individual. For example, if a patient previously had severe difficulty swallowing and regains the ability to eat safely, that change may be extremely meaningful even if other symptoms remain,” he says.
Muppidi also notes that there’s no unwritten rule that a two-point improvement in a symptom means the issue has been resolved. “It just tells us we might be moving in the right direction,” he says.