ITP-QoL questionnaire for children with immune thrombocytopenia: Italian version validation's.
BACKGROUND
The ITP-QoL is a disease-specific questionnaire for the assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in children with immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) and their parents. The aim of this study was to test the psychometric characteristics of the ITP-QoL in the Italian pediatric population in terms of validity and reliability.


METHODS
Children aged 8-16 years with acute or chronic ITP and their parents were recruited in Italy. Participants completed the ITP-QoL together with other patient-reported outcomes (PROs). Reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha. Convergent validity was determined by means of the Pearson correlation coefficients.


RESULTS
A total of 91 ITP patients, mean age of 12.11 ± 2.47 years, and their parents participated; 61.5% of the patients were female. Two patients had acute ITP and 30.2% had a moderate to severe status of ITP. Cutaneous symptoms were more frequent than mucosal symptoms. Due to item and scale analyses 20 items were deleted from the original ITP-QoL. Internal consistency of the ITP-QoL was found to be good with Cronbach's alpha exceeding α = 0.70 for all but one subscale. Concerning convergent validity "moderate" to "high" negative correlations were found between ITP-QoL and KINDL subscales. The ITP-QoL was able to discriminate between clinical subgroups such as number of days lost at school due to ITP and hospitalization.


CONCLUSIONS
Our study was able to demonstrate that the Italian version of ITP-QoL (for children aged 8-16 years) is a valid and reliable instrument for the assessment of HRQoL in children with ITP.
Department of Biomedical Sciences and Human Oncology, Pediatric Unit "F. Vecchio", University of Bari "Aldo Moro" , Bari , Italy.
Paola
P
Giordano
Giuseppe
G
Lassandro
Fiorina
F
Giona
Momcilo
M
Jankovic
Margherita
M
Nardi
Bruno
B
Nobili
Lucia Dora
LD
Notarangelo
Giovanna
G
Russo
Sylvia von
Sv
Mackensen
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D008297:Male; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods*; D016553:Purpura, Thrombocytopenic, Idiopathic / Q000523:psychology*; D011788:Quality of Life; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014177:Translations
Italy; children; immune thrombocytopenia (ITP); psychometric testing; quality of life