sitemap: home >> development
The interest of clinical research
in aging males increased in recent years and thereby the interest to measure health-related quality of life and symptoms of aging men.
The Aging Males' Symptoms (AMS) scale was originally developed in Germany in 1999 [ 5 ] based on the assumption that - like women during their menopausal transition -men also develop similar complaints [ 6 ].
The development of the scale started with a listing of symptoms/ complaints and a comparison of more than 200 variables in more than 100 medically well characterized males (aged over 40 years).
A factorial analysis was applied to establish the raw scale of complaints or symptoms that are not particularly related to diseases, treatment, social and other variables, but related with aging. Statistical methods were used to identify the dimensions of the scale and to reduce the number of items of the raw scale.
Finally, three dimensions of symptoms/complaints were identified in the patients group: a psychological, a somato-vegetative, and a sexual factor that explained 51.6% of the total variance and the number of items of the scale could be reduced to 17.
This final scale was applied to a large representative population sample of 992 German males in order to establish reference values for the severity of symptoms in males over 40.
Later developments
International research during the recent years has contributed to the development of the AMS scale as a patient-reported outcome (PRO) scale used in clinical studies in all age groups of men, i.e. healthy and ill persons. This development was recently summarized in a review (June 2006).
This unpublished review is available as PDF-file and was fostered by the new guidelines of FDA for development of PRO scales.
[5]. Heinemann LAJ, Zimmermann T, Vermeulen A, Thiel C. A New 'Aging Male's Symptoms' (AMS) Rating Scale. The Aging Male 1999; 2:105-114.
[6]. Heinemann LAJ, Thiel Ch, Assmann A, Zimmermann T, Hummel W, Vermeulen A. Sex differences of "climacteric symptoms" with increasing age? A pooled analysis of cross-sectional population-based surveys. The Aging Male 2000; 3:124-131.
