Reliability and validity of QOLIE-10 in measuring health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Chinese epilepsy patients

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to translate and validate a short-form of Quality of Life Inventory in Epilepsy-89 (QOLIE-89)-QOLIE-10 for use in the busy clinical setting. METHODS: Accepted procedures were adopted to translate the QOLIE-10. Patients with epilepsy from two tertiary hospitals in China were asked to complete a standardized questionnaire including QOLIE-10, EQ-5D, QWB-SA and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). Construct validity was assessed via factor analysis. Convergent validity was explored via the correlations between QOLIE-10 and other external measures. The ability of QOLIE-10 to differentiate between epilepsy-specific variables was tested to examine the discriminant validity. Cronbach's alpha was calculated to test the reliability. Additionally, HRQoL according to different epilepsy-specific variables was compared. RESULTS: 220 Respondents completed QOLIE-10 and EQ-5D, among which 141 subjects completed QWB-SA and MMSE. Two subscales were yielded in the factor analysis. The correlations between QOLIE-10 scores and EQ-5D, QWB-SA, MMSE were significant thus demonstrated the convergent validity. Furthermore, QOLIE-10 was able to differentiate patients with various seizure frequency, refractory epilepsy and antiepileptic treatment. The Cronbach's alpha was 0.853. In general, more predictive variables were identified to associate with QOLIE-10 scores than the other two instruments. Comorbidity (0.015), numbers of AEDs (0.037), seizure types (0.041) and refractory epilepsy (0.016) were potential predictors of HRQoLQOLIE-10, whereas there were fewer predictors for HRQoLEQ-5D or HRQoLQWB-SA. CONCLUSIONS: QOLIE-10 appeared to be a reliable and sensitive instrument to assess the HRQoL for epilepsy patients. According to the MLR analyses, numbers of AEDs, refractory epilepsy, comorbidity depression, and cognitive function were demonstrated to be predictors of HRQoL dependent on different tools. Comparisons between the tools suggested epilepsy-specific instrument was more competent to discriminate HRQoL based on condition variables. However, a longitudinal study is still needed to examine the responsiveness of Chinese QOLIE-10.