A new system for scoring severity and measuring recovery in decompression illness.

A prerequisite for the investigation of any therapy for a disease is an objective scoring system for both severity at presentation and response to treatment. Decompression illness (DCI) is particularly difficult in this context as the clinical presentations are protean. The conventional practice of describing recoveries as nil, incomplete or complete can be very misleading, as this results in a relative weighting for a complete recovery of paraesthesiae in a left ring finger over a 95% recovery in a tetraplegic. The overall effect is to introduce a potentially significant bias.