Psychometric validation of the French Multidimensional Chronic Asthenia Scale (MCAS) in a sample of 621 patients with chronic fatigue

Ingrid Banovic; Fabrizio Scrima; Isabelle Fornasieri; Laurent Beaugerie; Jérémy Coquart; Chloé Fourgon; Pierpaolo Iodice; Isabelle Nion-Larmurier; Guillaume Savoye; Anne-Laure Sorin; Claire Tourny; Maria Augustinova

doi:10.1186/s40359-023-01358-1

Psychometric validation of the French Multidimensional Chronic Asthenia Scale (MCAS) in a sample of 621 patients with chronic fatigue

BMC Psychol. 2023 Oct 10;11(1):324. doi: 10.1186/s40359-023-01358-1.

Affiliations

¹ CRFDP Lab., University of Rouen Normandy, 76821, Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex, France. Ingrid.Banovic@univ-rouen.fr.
² CRFDP Lab., University of Rouen Normandy, 76821, Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex, France.
³ Faculty of Psychology, University of Strasbourg, 67000, Strasbourg, France.
⁴ Department of Gastroenterology, Sorbonne Université, INSERM, Institut Pierre Louis d'Epidémiologie Et de Santé Publique, AP-HP, Hôpital Saint-Antoine, 75012, Paris, France.
⁵ CETAPS Lab., University of Rouen Normandy, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France.
⁶ Univ. Lille, Univ. Artois, Univ. Littoral Côte d'Opale, ULR - URePSSS - Unité de Recherche Pluridisciplinaire Sport Santé Société, 7369, Lille, France.
⁷ UMR 10173, Université de Rouen Normandie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Charles Nicolle, 76000, Rouen, France.

Abstract

Background: Psychometric validation of the Multidimensional Chronic Asthenia Scale (MCAS) was conducted in order to provide an effective tool for assessing the health-related quality of life of French-speaking patients with chronic asthenia (CA).

Methods: Items resulting from the initial formulation of the self-reported MCAS (along with other materials) were completed by French-speaking volunteers with inactive or active inflammatory bowel disease (IBD-I vs. IBD-A) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Responses from 621 participants (180 patients with IBD-A, 172 with IBD-I, 269 with CFS) collected in a single online survey were divided into three subsamples to test the construct validity of the MCAS (Step 1, N = 240), to confirm its factorial structure (Step 2, N = 204) and to explore its convergent-discriminant validity with the Fatigue Symptoms Inventory (FSI) and revised Piper Fatigue Scale (r-PFS, Step 3, N = 177).

Results: Steps 1 and 2 showed that, as expected, MCAS has four dimensions: feeling of constraint (FoC), physical (PC), life (LC) and interpersonal consequences (IC), which are also related to the duration of CA (i.e., the longer it lasts, the more the dimensions are impacted). The results further showed that the MCAS is sensitive enough to capture between-group differences, with the CFS group being the most impaired, followed by IBD-A and IBD-I. While convergent-discriminant validity between the 4 factors of MCAS and FSI and r-PFS, respectively, was satisfactory overall, Step 3 also pointed to some limitations that call for future research (e.g., shared variances between the PC and IC dimensions of MCAS and behavioral dimension of r-PFS).

Conclusion: Despite these limitations, the MCAS clearly constitutes a promising tool for measuring quantitative differences (i.e., severity/intensity) in CA associated with various diseases, but also, and importantly, the clinically important differences in domains of its expression (i.e., qualitative differences).

Keywords: Assessment tool validation; Chronic asthenia; Fatigue-specific scale; Health-related quality of life.

MeSH terms

Asthenia / complications
Asthenia / diagnosis
Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic* / diagnosis
Humans
Inflammatory Bowel Diseases*
Psychometrics
Quality of Life
Reproducibility of Results
Surveys and Questionnaires