Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Cervical Dysplasia (FACIT-CD) questionnaire for Serbian women

Abstract

Objectives: The FACIT-CD (Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Cervical Dysplasia) questionnaire is a disease-specific instrument for assessing the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in women with cervical dysplasia. Our aim was to perform a cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric evaluation of the FACIT-CD scale in Serbian women with cervical squamous intraepithelial lesions (SIL).

Study design: Our study included women of reproductive age diagnosed with SIL in a single university-affiliated hospital. A total of 160 participants with histologically confirmed low-grade (LSIL) or high-grade (HSIL) squamous intraepithelial lesions responded to the Serbian version of the FACIT-CD instrument, the Short Form-36v2 questionnaire (SF-36v2), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Women also participated in an interview regarding their socio-demographic data. We evaluated the validity and reliability of the Serbian version of FACIT-CD.

Results: The Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.710 for the entire sample (0.702 for LSIL and 0.711 for HSIL). We found numerous correlations between the FACIT-CD scores and SF-36v2 scores, as well as between the BAI and BDI scores for both the total score and most of the domain scores. The mean FACIT-CD total score was high (114.47 ± 13.25 out of 136.00 which is the maximum score). There were no significant differences in the mean scores between the LSIL and HSIL groups.

Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that the Serbian FACIT-CD has overall good psychometric properties in women with both LSIL and HSIL. We propose the use of the FACIT-CD questionnaire as an indicator for HRQoL in women with cervical dysplasia.

Keywords: FACIT-CD; Psychometric scale; Reliability; Squamous intraepithelial lesion; Validity.