Validation of a parent-proxy quality of life questionnaire for paediatric chronic cough (PC-QOL)

Abstract

Background Quality of life (QOL) measures are an important patient-relevant outcome measure for clinical studies. Currently there is no fully validated cough-specific QOL measure for paediatrics. The objective of this study was to validate a cough-specific QOL questionnaire for paediatric use. Method 43 children (28 males, 15 females; median age 29 months, IQR 20e41 months) newly referred for chronic cough participated. One parent of each child completed the 27-item Parent Cough-Specific QOL questionnaire (PC-QOL), and the generic child (Pediatric QOL Inventory 4.0 (PedsQL)) and parent QOL questionnaires (SF-12) and two cough-related measures (visual analogue score and verbal category descriptive score) on two occasions separated by 2e3 weeks. Cough counts were also objectively measured on both occasions. Results Internal consistency for both the domains and total PC-QOL at both test times was excellent (Cronbach alpha range 0.70e0.97). Evidence for repeatability and criterion validity was established, with significant correlations over time and significant relationships with the cough measures. The PC-QOL was sensitive to change across the test times and these changes were significantly related to changes in cough measures (PC-QOL with: verbal category descriptive score, r s ¼À0.37, p¼0.016; visual analogue score, r s ¼À0.47, p¼0.003). Significant correlations of the difference scores for the social domain of the PC-QOL and the domain and total scores of the PedsQL were also noted (r s ¼0.46, p¼0.034). Conclusion The PC-QOL is a reliable and valid outcome measure that assesses QOL related to childhood cough at a given time point and measures changes in cough-specific QOL over time.

Pro-Con Debate: Protracted Bacterial Bronchitis as a Cause of Chronic Cough in Children

“…2 Chronic cough has negative impacts on schooling and sleep, and substantially reduces the health-related quality of life of children and their parents. 2,3 The burden of cough is also reflected in the billions of dollars spent annually on over-the-counter cough medications. 2,4,5 An increasing number of algorithms and guidelines have been developed for the evaluation and diagnosis of chronic cough in children.…”

Validated instruments for children and adolescents with chronic disease: an integrative review

“…Still on asthma, the authors [12] have developed a simplified questionnaire with four questions for the test diagnosis of the disease in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. The same diagnostic test methodology was used for chronic cough in Australia [23].…”

“…The authors [12,23] who chose to evaluate the ability of the instruments created to apply as predictors for the diagnosis of diseases such as asthma and chronic cough, they used the predictive type of validation to achieve the objectives. The content validation was used in some studies [10,11,16,17] as a method to check reliability to the purpose that each instrument proposed to measure.…”

An acute cough-specific quality-of-life questionnaire for children: Development and validation

“…10 Currently, there is no validated QoL tool specifically for acute cough in children. Although we previously described 2 validated versions of a chronic cough-specific QoL tool for children, [11][12][13] acute cough might be different from chronic cough in many ways (eg, etiology). Thus chronic cough-specific QoL tools cannot be extrapolated to acute cough without validation studies.…”