Assessment of Severity of Blepharospasm in Outpatients in a Tertiary Hospital using Blepharospasm Disability Scale and Jankovic Severity Scale

Abstract

Introduction
Blepharospasm is a condition characterized by involuntary and excessive blinking of eyelids. It is focal dystonia. The purpose of the study was to assess the severity of blepharospasm by both patient and physician rating scales and to compare the correlation between these two scores.

Methods
It was a single centred retrospective cross-sectional study in outpatient department (OPD) of neurology and Neuro-Ophthalmology of tertiary hospitals of Institute of Medicine (IOM). Data was extracted from the patient files who visited hospital between January 2023 till December 2023. Jankovic Rating Scale (JRS) was used to assess the severity by physician and Blepharospasm Disability Index (BSDI) by patient to self-score their disability. Analysis was done using IBM SPSS version 26. Correlation between physician scored scale and patient reported scores were done by using Spearman’s rho.  p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results
17 patients were included. The mean age of study population was 56.84 ± 14.37 years, and 58.8% of patients were female. Only 29% were receiving botulinum toxin injection. Mean BSDI score was 5.41 ± 4.77 and mean JRS score was 5.82 ± 0.88. No significant correlation was observed between the BSDI and JRS scores (rho = 0.418, p = 0.095).

Conclusion
JRS and BDSI are both useful and widely used tools to assess severity of blepharospasm. However, our study showed only moderate correlation between physician and patient rating scales. Reason could be due to small sample size. Larger multicentre studies are advisable.