Spanish Translation of the Widespread Pain Index and Symptom Severity Scale for the Diagnosis of Juvenile Fibromyalgia

Abstract

Juvenile fibromyalgia (JFM) is a chronic musculoskeletal pain condition affecting 2%-6% of school-aged children. Despite its prevalence in pediatric populations, diagnostic resources for JFM are limited. One study validated the widespread pain index (WPI) and symptom severity (SS) scale based on the 2010 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) adult fibromyalgia criteria for JFM among primarily Caucasian adolescents (Ting et al., 2016). However, these patient-report measures are not validated in Spanish and may not be generalizable to Spanish-speaking populations. To date, one study has validated the 2010 ACR criteria among adult Spanish speakers (Segura-Jimenez et al., 2014), yet there was no formal description of the translation process and youth were not included. This study aimed to develop a Spanish version of the WPI and SS scale for the diagnosis of JFM using a culturally sensitive translation methodology. The translation guidelines from the ISPOR task force for translation and cultural adaptation (Wild et al., 2005) were utilized in this study. Two native Spanish speakers residing in Spain completed the forward translation of the WPI and SS scale separately and agreed upon one Spanish translation. Then, two native Spanish speakers residing in the United States (U.S.) completed the back translation separately and agreed upon one English translation, considering the heterogeneity in language use existing within Spanish-speaking groups in the U.S. The back-translated measures were sent to forward translators for final revisions and finalized by team consensus. The Spanish version of the WPI and SS questionnaires were successfully translated via ISPOR standards and are ready for cognitive debriefing amongst Spanish-speaking patients to ensure the translated surveys are comprehensible. Considering the controversy surrounding lacking JFM criteria, it is essential that throughout the process of validating future JFM criteria, a culturally sensitive approach is utilized to ensure multilingual surveys are accessible to non-English speaking patients. Grant support from P30 AR076316 NIAMS/NIH (Co-I Kashikar-Zuck).