Objective: To assess medical student knowledge of dystonia, and their confidence to recognise a case, before and after a brief educational intervention.

Background: Dystonia remains insufficiently recognised by doctors, resulting in delayed diagnosis, inappropriate management and poor quality of life for patients. One method to improve this is to increase medical student knowledge of dystonia but there has been little investigation of this area. Any new educational interventions must be short to fit in with busy curriculums.

Method: A prospective, questionnaire-based medical education research project assessed knowledge of 3 common types of dystonia (cervical, hand, face) among medical students at University of Leeds, UK. A new 8-minute video was designed as the intervention. Students complete 15 multiple choice questions (MCQs), including case scenarios, on 3 occasions: before watching the video to assess baseline knowledge of dystonia, immediately after watching the video to assess short term recall and 1 month later to assess long-term knowledge retention.

Results: So far, 64 students have been recruited and interim results indicate that 77% had never received any teaching on dystonia. The average number of correctly answered MCQs increased from 7.3 (range 3-12) on the baseline questionnaire to 12.4 (range 9-15) on the immediate recall questionnaire. Before the educational video, 64% of students rated their ‘confidence to recognise dystonia’ as 1 on a 5 points scale, with 1 being ‘not all confident’ and 5 being ‘very confident’. After the 8-minute video intervention, only 8% of students still rated their confidence as 1, and 43% rated it as 4 or 5. The long-term retention questionnaire has not yet been advertised as the study is still ongoing. Only a small minority of students (3.3%) indicated neurology as their career aspiration.

Conclusion: Baseline medical student knowledge of dystonia was low but this brief intervention led to significant increased knowledge of dystonia and, importantly, their confidence to recognise dystonia. Video education effectively demonstrates the key clinical features of dystonia and could be easily incorporated into medical student curriculums.  This simple low-cost method holds potential to improve recognition of dystonia by the ‘doctors of tomorrow’, which is crucially important given that most students indicated a preference to specialise in a field other than neurology.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/what-do-medical-students-know-about-dystonia-results-before-and-after-a-brief-educational-intervention/