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New questionnaire more accurately identified rheumatic disease
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Researchers from the University of Toronto developed a new questionnaire to more accurately screen for rheumatic disease in the outpatient setting.
Susan M. Armstrong, PhD, in the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Toronto, and colleagues developed a new questionnaire by beginning each question with, “Has a doctor ever told you that you had … ” followed by each disease. The researchers also added confirmatory questions about medications, symptoms or treatment by a specialist.
The researchers evaluated their questionnaire using 141 participants who were either healthy or had some form of rheumatic disease, such as lupus, sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome or inflammatory myositis. The researchers assessed comprehensibility using the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. They also validated patients’ self-reported diagnoses against medical records using Cohen’s statistic.
Investigators found the Flesch Reading Ease score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level were 77.1 and 4.4, respectively. One a scale from one to seven, participants reported a comprehensibility score of 6.12; a feasibility of 5.94; a validity of 5.35; and an acceptability of 3.1. The questionnaire had a sensitivity of 91% and a specificity of 99%. The agreement between the questionnaire and medical record had a Cohen coefficient of 0.82 for all disease, 0.88 for lupus, 1 for sclerosis, 0.72 for myositis and 0.85 for Sjögren’s syndrome. The screening questions had a sensitivity of 0.91 to 1. These showed specificity of 0.88 to 1.
The researchers concluded the use of both screening and confirmatory questions added to accuracy. – by Will Offit
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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