Comparing Subjective Scales for Rating Drooling: A Pilot, Bicentric, Study

Drooling affects up to 58% of children with severe neurological disorders and greatly influences the patient’s Quality of Life (QoL). Drooling recognition and therapeutic management represent a fundamental step in the care of both the patient and his caregivers. Nowadays, novel treatments for pediatric drooling are facing the market, although the methods to assess their clinical utility and efficacy are not experimentally grounded and lack uniformity. The lack of reliable metrics to assess efficacy and safety outcomes in drooling limits researchers from identifying the best patient-suitable treatment. Furthermore, existing objective assessment methods do not consider the overall patient’s quality of life, which is a fundamental parameter in evaluating treatments’ effectiveness. Therefore, the application of subjective scales is suggested. The main goal is to develop a unique and validated technique to rate drooling, which will allow a reliable and safe assessment, and to carry out a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of the specific anti-drooling treatment. Therefore, a key enabler for new efficient therapies stands in the introduction of accurate and robust scales to measure their effects on drooling. An accurate approach must study the severity, frequency, and all the physical and psychological complications to improve the quality of life of the patients and their families. Sforza and collaborators reviewed the scales used for a comprehensive assessment of drooling; however, they underlined the need for more data to determine validity, reliability, and responsiveness. We performed a pilot experimental study on a group of Italian paediatric patients with neurological disorders of broad aetiologies, to evaluate the adequacy and differences between the three most used subjective scales (DIS, mTDS, and DSFS) in rating drooling.