Background: Functional bowel disorders are considered a public health problem, but there are a few prevalence studies in Brazil. In 1999, researchers from the Mayo Clinic developed The Bowel Disease Questionnaire with the purpose to evaluate functional bowel disorders. Although this has been used in different studies and population, it is often necessary to perform a cultural adaptation of a questionnaire developed for use in another culture, in order to improve the quality of the information obtained.
Objective: To translate and adapt the Bowel Disease Questionnaire to Portuguese for its use in adolescents.
Methods: Assessment of conceptual and item equivalence involved evaluation of the pertinence of the concepts in the Brazilian context; translation was evaluated through semantic equivalence between the original instrument and the Portuguese version; measurement equivalence between the original and the Portuguese version was assessed by the intra-observer reliability and internal consistency.
Results: The Bowel Disease Questionnaire's concepts were considered pertinent in the Brazilian context; the semantic equivalence between the original and the Portuguese version were high; reliability ranged from moderate to almost perfect; internal consistency of the scales ranged from 0,66 to 0,74.
Conclusion: The Portuguese version of the Bowel Disease Questionnaire seems to be semantically and culturally equivalent to the original version and might be useful for measuring functional bowel disorders among Brazilian adolescents.