The Toronto outcome measure for craniofacial prosthetics: a condition-specific quality-of-life instrument.
OBJECTIVE
The objective was to develop a patient-based outcome measure of condition-specific quality of life that would minimize measurement error related to the instrument when used with patients requiring extraoral craniofacial prostheses.


METHODS
An item pool of potential questionnaire items covered 10 clinical/technical and social/psychologic domains. They sought how frequently the issue in the item affected patients and how important the problem in the item was. The 139 items were administered to 94 treated patients in 5 centers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Items were eliminated using relevance (frequency x importance), frequency of answer endorsement, Cronbach's alpha (internal consistency), and correlation of items on the same subject. International cultural agreement was tested using analysis of variance and Tukey comparisons within each domain. Scoring was transformed to a scale (0 to 100).


RESULTS
The final instrument contained 52 items yielding a mean quality of-life score of 72.5% and a standard deviation of 17.9. Very high internal consistency was demonstrated with a final Cronbach's alpha of 0.967. No international cultural disagreement was found in 9 of the 10 domains.


CONCLUSIONS
The relative weight of each of the domains is (partially) based on the relevance to the patients. Of the 52 items, 29 were identified that do not mention a prosthesis. This subscale has a Cronbach's alpha of 0.976. These items may therefore be useful where within-patient change is of interest.


CONCLUSIONS
A patient-based outcome measure of condition-specific quality of life has been developed with control of bias and demonstrated performance characteristics.
Anderson
Jim D
JD
Craniofacial Prosthetic Unit, Toronto Sunnybrook Regional Cancer Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. jim.anderson@utoronto.ca
Szalai
John P
JP
D000339:Affect; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001294:Attitude to Health; D015982:Bias; D001828:Body Image; D003469:Culture; D004954:Esthetics; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D016555:Matched-Pair Analysis; D009864:Ontario; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D019736:Prostheses and Implants / Q000523:psychology*; D011474:Prosthesis Design; D011788:Quality of Life; D019529:Sexuality; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D006113:United Kingdom; D014481:United States