Instrumentos de qualidade de vida para avaliação da participação de indivíduos acometidos pelo acidente vascular encefálico: o que realmente está sendo avaliado?

Abstract

The participation component of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) was named as the most complex to be characterized from existing instruments currently, to assess participation after stroke indicates the use the following questionnaires related quality of life (HRQoL): Nottingham Health Profile (NHP), Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) and the Stroke Specific Quality of Life (SS-QOL). However, participation and HRQoL are different constructs, so it is unclear whether these instruments are best suited to evaluate the participation component of the ICF. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate whether these instruments are indeed the most appropriate to evaluate the participation after stroke. Therefore, initially we present a systematic review to identify the categories of the ICF participation were related to HRQL questionnaires, and after, we conducted a cross-sectional study with a sample of 35 individuals that were applied in the SS-QOL with NHP and order to correlate the total score of the questionnaires with the score of items relating to the categories of participation component of the ICF, for both used the Spearman correlation coefficient (r). The systematic review returned four studies that identified nine categories of participation in NHP, seven in SF-36 and SS-15 in QOL, as the cross-sectional study, there was a statistically significant correlation, positive and strong correlation between the total score of the SS-QOL and NHP with the scores of items specific to the component of participation (r = 0.8, p = 0.001) and (r = 0.9, p = 0.001), respectively. Given the above, it can be inferred that both the NHP, as the SS-QOL are appropriate for assessing participation, however, the SS-QOL seems to be the most appropriate tool for evaluating more distinct domains, by presenting as many related items participation and for having the largest number of categories associated with participation component.