AB 7. Validation of the greek version of the severe respiratory insufficiency questionnaire

Abstract

Background The Severe Respiratory Insufficiency (SRI) questionnaire is a multidimensional tool, which has been validated for the assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQL) in patients with severe chronic respiratory failure resulting from a variety of underlying disorders. Aim of this study was the validation of the SRI questionnaire in a sample of Greek patients with severe chronic respiratory failure.

Patients and methods The SRI questionnaire contains seven subscales related to respiratory complaints (RC), physical functioning (PF), attendant symptoms and sleep (AS), social relationships (SR), anxiety (AX), psychological well-being (WB), social functioning (SF) and a summary scale (SS). We studied 136 consecutive patients with severe respiratory failure of miscellaneous origin. Sixty-three patients (46.3%) were on Long-Term Oxygen Therapy (LTOT) while 73 (53.7%) received Home Mechanical Ventilation (HMV) in addition to LTOT. All patients underwent lung function testing and completed the SRI questionnaire.

Results The Cronbach’s A was high for the summary scale with a value 0.856 showing high internal consistency. The results of the principal component analysis (PCA) on the SRI-SS produce a one factor construct with a variance of 54%, which validates the preexisting one factor SS. HMV group patients had higher SRI-SS score than LTOT group (61.5 60.5, P=NS). The highest and the lowest score were detected in SRI-RC and SRI-PF subscales in both groups. COPD patients had lower SRI-SS score than non-COPD. Regarding COPD subgroups, the SRI-SS score was 52.9 in COPD-HMV patients and 60.3 in COPD-LTOT (P=NS).

Conclusions The Greek version of the SRI questionnaire is equivalent to the original one and well-reproducible in patients with severe chronic respiratory failure. This questionnaire could be used in Greek-speaking people in the same way as in other languages to assess HRQL.