title: 'What About Swallowing?' Diagnostic Performance of Daily Clinical Practice Compared with the Eating Assessment Tool-10.
abstract: In daily clinical practice, patients are frequently asked about their swallowing as part of the patient-clinician interview. This study compares the diagnostic performance of a single open question 'What about swallowing?' (usual care) with the Eating Assessment Tool (EAT-10) as reference test in screening for oropharyngeal dysphagia (OD). 303 outpatients at risk of OD were recruited at three university hospitals: 162 men and 141 women with a mean age of 70 years. All data were retrieved by phone. To identify patients at risk of dysphagia, two different cut-off scores for the EAT-10 total score were retrieved from the literature. The diagnostic performance of the single question was determined by comparing dichotomized answers to the single question (no problems versus difficulties in swallowing) with the EAT-10 as reference test. Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values ranged between 0.75-0.76, 0.75-0.84, 0.93-0.97 and 0.38-0.43, respectively. Mostly, the results of this exploratory study indicate a sufficient diagnostic performance of the single question in identifying patients who are at risk of dysphagia when using the EAT-10 questionnaire as a reference test. Further research, is, however, necessary to provide additional psychometric data on Functional Health Status (FHS) questionnaires including the single question using either FEES or VFS as gold standard or reference test.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery, Leiden University Medical Centre, PO Box 9600, 2300 RC, Leiden, The Netherlands. b.j.heijnen@lumc.nl.
authors.forename: Bas Joris
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Heijnen
authors.affiliation: Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery, Leiden University Medical Centre, PO Box 9600, 2300 RC, Leiden, The Netherlands.|College of Healthcare Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia.
authors.forename: Renée
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Speyer
authors.affiliation: Diagnostic Centre of Imaging and Functional Medicine, Malmö, Sweden.|Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden.|Skane University Hospital Malmö, Malmö, Sweden.
authors.forename: Margareta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bülow
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Sciences, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium.
authors.forename: Laura Mf
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Kuijpers
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003679:Deglutition; D003680:Deglutition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D059026:Diagnostic Self Evaluation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D063189:Symptom Assessment / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Deglutition; Deglutition disorders; Diagnostic performance; Dysphagia; Screening; Swallowing disorders