COMPASS-31 (autonomic)
What It Measures
COMPASS-31 asks about the symptoms that arise when the autonomic nervous system is not regulating the body well — the system that runs blood pressure, sweating, digestion, bladder, and pupil response without conscious effort. These symptoms are easy for a clinician to miss because they span so many body systems at once.
Thirty-one questions cover six domains: orthostatic intolerance (feeling faint or foggy on standing), vasomotor, secretomotor (sweating and dryness), gastrointestinal, bladder, and pupillomotor. Each domain is scored and then weighted, so a domain that matters more for autonomic function counts for more. Orthostatic intolerance carries the most weight at 40 points and gastrointestinal the next at 25. The six weighted scores sum to a total from 0 to 100, higher meaning more symptoms.
Further Reading
Additional Notes
Licensing Notes: It is catalogued in the NIH NINDS Common Data Elements repository and reproduced with scoring instructions by clinical and research organizations without a posted fee.
Learn More: A cut-off of 28.3 on the total score has been used to distinguish people with and without autonomic dysfunction.
