Background/aims: Different non-invasive diagnostics strategies have been used to assess patients with gastroesophageal reflux. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) questionnaire (GerdQ) is a 6-item, easy to use questionnaire that was developed primarily as a diagnostic tool for GERD in primary care. Our aim was to validate and assess diagnostic utility of GerdQ questionnaire in Mexican patients in the primary care setting.
Methods: The study was performed in 3 phases: (1) a questionnaire translation and comprehension study (n = 20), (2) are a reproduci-bility and validation study (50 patients and 50 controls) and (3) a study to assess the clinical utility in 252 subjects with GERD symptoms. Diagnostic accuracy was calculated using endoscopy and/or pH-metry as the gold standard.
Results: Internal consistency measured by the Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.81 for patients and 0.90 for healthy controls, with a mixed coefficient of 0.93. Reproducibility for GerdQ was very good and its discriminating validity was 88%. Most of the pa-tients with erosive reflux and non-erosive reflux with abnormal pH-metry had scores > 8, meanwhile most of the patients with functional heartburn and hypersensitive esophagus had < 8. Sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of GerdQ com-pared to the gold standard were 72%, 72% and 87%, respectively.
Conclusions: In Mexico, the GerdQ questionnaire Spanish validated version is useful for GERD diagnosis in the primary care setting.(J Neurogastroenterol Motil 2014;20:475-482).
Keywords: Gastroesophageal reflux; Mexico; Questionnaires; Sensitivity and specificity.