Rhodes Index Assessment Tool
There are many assessment tools for measuring the severity of nausea and vomiting.
Quoted from State of the Art 2000: International consensus on standards for studying the efficacy of pharmacological therapies for nausea and vomiting of pregnancy.
A major issue in interpreting and comparing studies on the management of NVP has been the use of numerous different methods to qualify and quantify nausea, vomiting and related symptoms. Different researchers have arbitrarily defined NVP as "mild", "moderate" or "severe" without clear quantitative definitions or biological logic.
Often the assessments have been retrospective. In some cases end points were measured dichotomously as success/failure or as percentage preferring one drug over the other (in crossover studies). While these approaches may be reasonable in randomised control trials (RCTs), assuming that all arms of the studies are evaluated similarly, the clinical interpretation of arbitrary endpoints and comparison between studies becomes difficult, if not impossible.
We feel that future studies should use a standard, validated tool that will allow comparison among studies.
The Rhodes Index appears to be an optimal tool for this purpose. It separately scores, as categorical variables, the number of vomiting episodes per day, the size of the vomiting, the degree and length of nausea and retching, as well as the distress associated with the condition (Table 1). The inventory can be done once or twice a day and, in addition to an overall score, one can report separately on the frequency and changes in nausea, vomiting, retching and stress.
TABLE 1: RHODES INDEX OF NAUSEA, VOMITING AND RETCHING
Updated on: Sep. 15, 2022
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