Quantitative Clinical Neurological Testing. I. a Study of a Battery of Tests Designed to Evaluate in Part the Neurological Function of Patients with Multiple Sclerosis and Its Use in a Therapeutic Trial.

The long term goal of this study is to design a battery of objective clinical neurological tests which are appropriate for patients with multiple sclerosis, so that the results of therapeutic trials in this disease might be evaluated with less bias and hence be more valid. In this study some of the conventional neurologic tests used by clinicians’, to evaluate functional capacity of multiple sclerosis patients have been replaced in part by methods which lend themselves to more objective measurements. Since no previous studies along this line have been reported, it was necessary to design experiments on normal individuals and patients with multiple sclerosis to determine some of the limitations of the battery of tests before undertaking a therapeutic trial.