Abstract
BackgroundMaintaining glaucoma patients’ quality of life (QoL) has become one of the most important goals for treatments. The purpose of this study is to develop a Chinese version of Glaucoma Quality of Life-15 item Questionnaire (GQL-15-CHI), and examine its psychometric properties.MethodsThe Glaucoma Quality of Life-15 item Questionnaire (GQL-15) was translated and culturally adapted into Chinese, and administered to glaucoma patients recruited from Shanghai Eye and ENT Hospital. Visual functions: habitual-corrected visual acuity (HCVA), intraocular pressure (IOP), and mean defect (MD) of visual field) were assessed through clinical examination by professionals. Sociodemographic and other clinical data were collected via interviews and chart review. According to Nelson’s glaucoma staging system, patients were stratified as mild, moderate, and severe visual field loss (VFL). The psychometric properties, including internal consistency, test-retest reliability, item-scale correlations and factor analysis were conducted. The divergent validity was assessed through bilateral comparisons of the GQL-15-CHI composite and subscale scores between patients of different VFLs after controlling for potential confounders.ResultsA total of 508 glaucoma patients were recruited (male: 265, female: 243). The mean age was 55.41 years. The Cronbach’s α coefficients ranged from 0.75 to 0.91 for the subscales. The test-retest reliability, as estimated by the intraclass correlation coefficients, were above 0.70 for all subscales. Statistically significant differences were showed in the GQL-15-CHI summary and subscale scores after controlling for sociodemographic and clinical confounders (P < 0.05) among patients with different VFLs.ConclusionThe GQL-15-CHI showed psychometric properties comparable to those of the original English version, and thus could be used as a reliable and valid tool for assessment of QoL in Chinese glaucoma patients.
Highlights
Maintaining glaucoma patients’ quality of life (QoL) has become one of the most important goals for treatments
Demographics A total of 508 glaucoma patients were included in this study
Education level, duration of glaucoma, habitual-corrected visual acuity (HCVA), mean defect (MD), and higher intraocular pressure (IOP) of both eyes were all found to be significantly different among patients with different visual field loss (VFL)
Summary
Maintaining glaucoma patients’ quality of life (QoL) has become one of the most important goals for treatments. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. It was estimated that about 8.4 million people were blind due to glaucoma worldwide in the year of 2010, and more than one-fourth of them lived in China [1,2]. Apart from traditional measures, such as intraocular pressure (IOP), perimetry, visual acuity, in recent years, assessment of quality of life (QoL) is being increasingly recognized as a critical measurement in monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of different treatments of glaucoma [3,4,5,6,7].
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