Development of a novel location-based assessment of sensory symptoms in cancer patients: preliminary reliability and validity assessment.
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.
Burkey
Adam R
AR
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, USA. burkeya@uphs.upenn.edu
Kanetsky
Peter A
PA
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