Short Health Scale: a Valid and Reliable Quality of Life Scale for Chinese Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Abstract

\n Background: The aim of our study was to translate and validate the Chinese version of the Short Health Scale (SHS), a disease-specific quality of life (QoL) scale for the patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).Methods: The SHS was translated and validated according to the standard process: a translation and back-translation procedure, culture adaptation and a validation study. Patients with IBD were enrolled, and their QoL were assessed using the SHS and the short inflammatory bowel disease questionnaire (SIBDQ). Reliability (internal consistency reliability, split-half reliability and test-retest reliability) and validity (content validity, construct validity, criterion validity and discriminant validity) analysis were performed to evaluate the psychometric characteristics of the SHS.Results: A total of 95 patients with IBD (62 ulcerative colitis and 33 Crohn’s disease) completed the Chinese version of the SHS, and 40 patients completed the SHS within 1-4 weeks once again. Cronbach s alpha value of the SHS was 0.91, and its split-half coefficient was 0.83. Intraclass correlation coefficients of four items ranged from 0.55 to 0.75. All four items of the SHS were significantly associated with the corresponding domains of the SIBDQ, with correlation coefficients ranging from -0.47 to -0.63 (P < 0.001). Exploratory factor analysis showed that the cumulative contribution rate of variance reached 68%, and the factor loading of all the items were greater than 0.8. The scores of four items were significantly different for the patients of different Bristol stool form scale (P < 0.001). The scores of function, worry and general well-being were significantly different among the patients with different smoking status (P < 0.05).Conclusions: The SHS is a simple and quick scale. The SHS had good validity and reliability, and was suitable to evaluate the QoL of patients with IBD in Chinese.