DALLAS—The Duchenne Video Assessment (DVA) 2.0 is a reliable at-home tool that can measure ease of movement in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), researchers will report at the upcoming 2025 Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Clinical & Scientific Conference.
“The DVA directs caregivers to video record patients attempting specific movement tasks using a mobile application,” wrote Marielle G. Contesse, Ph.D., and other authors of a study on the tool. “DVA-certified physical therapists rate videos using validated scorecards with clinically meaningful compensatory movement criteria.”
The MDA conference is being held here March 16-19, 2025.
The DVA 2.0, which includes 18 movement tasks, can assess patients at any disease stage using groups of tasks.
Read more about DMD testing and diagnosis
The study specifically tested how well the DVA 2.0 measured what researchers called “total composite severity percentage.”
“The DVA 2.0 composite severity percentage was found to be a valid and reliable measure of ease of movement for individuals with DMD,” they concluded.
Researchers investigated the consistency across three raters for 129 patients with DMD from a clinical trial called ARISE. The study found excellent consistency between the raters for the total composite severity percentage, according to the abstract.
That measurement strongly correlated with total scores on two tools used in the ARISE study—the North Star Ambulatory Assessment and the Performance of Upper Limb 2.0, researchers found.
In video assessments taken two weeks apart, the minimally detectable difference in total composite severity percentage was 6%, the study found.
