title: Development of a novel location-based assessment of sensory symptoms in cancer patients: preliminary reliability and validity assessment.
abstract: We report on the development of a novel location-based assessment of sensory symptoms in cancer (L-BASIC) instrument, and its initial estimates of reliability and validity. L-BASIC is structured so that patients provide a numeric score and an adjectival description for any sensory symptom, including both pain and neuropathic sensations, present in each of the 10 predefined body areas. Ninety-seven patients completed the baseline questionnaire; 39 completed the questionnaire on two occasions. A mean of 3.5 body parts was scored per patient. On average, 2.7 (of 11) descriptor categories were used per body part. There was good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha=0.74) for a four-item scale that combined location-specific metrics. Temporal stability was adequate (kappa>0.50 and r>0.60 for categorical and continuous variables, respectively) among patients without observed or reported subjective change in clinical status between L-BASIC administrations. We compared our four-item scale against scores obtained from validated pain and quality-of-life (QOL) scales, and as expected, correlations were higher for pain-related items than for QOL-related items. We detected differences in L-BASIC responses among patients with cancer-related head or neck pain, chemotherapy-related neuropathy and breast cancer-related lymphedema. We conclude that L-BASIC provides internally consistent and temporally stable responses, while acknowledging that further refinement and testing of this novel instrument are necessary. We anticipate that future versions of L-BASIC will provide reliable and valid syndrome-specific measurement of defined clinical pain and symptom constructs in the cancer population, which may be of particular value in assessing treatment response in patients with such multiple complaints.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, USA. burkeya@uphs.upenn.edu
authors.forename: Adam R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Burkey
authors.forename: Peter A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Kanetsky
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis*; D009437:Neuralgia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D010146:Pain / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology; D010147:Pain Measurement / Q000379:methods*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult