Therese Juul, Aarhus University Hospital, highlights the LARS scoring tool, used to identify symptomatic patients and treat them afterwards, and currently available in 24 languages.
The Low Anterior Resection Syndrome score (LARS Score) is an easy-to-use tool for assessment of bowel dysfunction following a low anterior resection for rectal cancer.
Several validation studies have been conducted, of which many are published - an overview is available below:
LARS norm data
A random sample of 1875 Danes from the background population completed the LARS score. Surprisingly, quite a high proportion had bowel symptoms corresponding to 'Major LARS', especially women in the age group 50-79, which is the age-group relevant for comparisons in most rectal cancer studies. Don't forget to take this into account when interpreting LARS score results in scientific studies. The paper is currently in peer review at Annals of Surgery.
LARS scoring instructions are available below together with the Bowel Function Questionnaire in 24 languages (PDFs):
- The LARS Score - scoring instructions
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Hebrew
- Japanese
- Korean
- Lithuanian
- Malay (Singapore)
- Malayalam
- Mandarin (Singapore)
- Mandarin (Chinese)
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Tamil (Madhupriya, India)
- Tamil (Singapore)
