My cts score?

The first 4 numbers, which can range from 1 to 5 are your subjective severity scores from the Boston/Levine CTS questionnaire which forms the last few questions of the overall questionnaire. These numbers indicate how bad the symptoms feel to you and how much impact they have on your daily activities with higher numbers indicating more severe symptoms. There are separate scores for the right and left hand symptoms. This bit of the questionnaire can be done repeatedly to track how your symptoms are changing over time.

The last two numbers are the results of the analysis of your symptoms to see how closely they match those of a typical CTS patient. We do this using two different mathematical methods - hence the two numbers, one from each method. These numbers can range from about -20 to 120 and in this case higher numbers indicate a more typical history of CTS. Your scores of -14 and 0 suggest that your symptoms do not match those of the average CTS patient very well at all. This does not absolutely rule out CTS as the cause but it does make it considerably less likely.

It is worth noting that the questionnaire was calibrated using patients who were describing their symptoms at first presentation before they had been treated for CTS on either side with steroids or surgery and it is likely to be less accurate in patients who have already been treated. We also know that it is less accurate in patients with diabetes but outside these special circumstances if your symptom sscore is 10% then about 1 in 10 people like you will turn out to have nerve conduction evidence of CTS when tested - though a positive test does not of course prove that the nerve conduction abnormality is necessarily the cause of the symptoms. JB