Chest
Original ResearchQuality of LifeDevelopment of a Parent-Proxy Quality-of-Life Chronic Cough-Specific Questionnaire: Clinical Impact vs Psychometric Evaluations
Section snippets
Participants
One hundred seventy children < 18 years of age (97 boys and 73 girls; median age, 4.0 years; interquartile range [IQR], 3.00 to 7.25; 10 children were ≥ 13 years of age) and one of their parents were recruited. All children presented to the Royal Children's Hospital, newly referred with chronic cough (cough for > 3 weeks19). The exclusion criteria were as follows: presence of previously diagnosed respiratory diseases (eg, cystic fibrosis); classic asthma (recurrent wheeze or dyspnea responsive
Clinical Impact
The 50 QOL items were ranked according to the strength of their impact (Table 1). Based on an arbitrary cutoff at a natural break in impact rating, the 27 highest impact scores were selected. The reduced QOL scale was internally consistent (α = 0.94) with a median impact score of 4.35 (IQR, 3.26 to 5.2). Interitem correlations ranged from Spearman correlation (rs) = 0.12 to 0.87 (median, 0.40).
Psychometric Method
Two separate factor analyses were conducted, one on the 30 frequency items and another on the 20 worry
Discussion
The present study sought to generate a reliable and valid pediatric QOL instrument for parents/caregivers of children with chronic cough. A PC-QOL instrument is a necessary addition to our understanding of the impact of children's cough on caregivers' mental health and subsequent burden. The original 50 items were parent-derived and thus reflected issues of relevance to parents. The two methods of identifying items for the QOL instrument resulted in some overlap with 13 common items. Both had
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Prof. Varni and the Mapi Research Institute for allowing us to utilize the PedsQL4.0 Inventory without cost.
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Cited by (0)
This study was supported by the Royal Children's Hospital Foundation. Dr. Chang is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia, Practitioner Fellowship.
The authors have reported to the ACCP that no significant conflicts of interest exist with any companies/organizations whose products or services may be discussed in this article.