Paper

The Construction of a New Evaluative GERD Questionnaire - Methods and State of the Art
David Armstrong^a, Hubert Mönnikes^b, Karna Dev Bardhan^c, Vincenzo Stanghellini<sup>d

a</sup>McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., Canada;
^bCharité, Berlin, Germany;
^cDistrict General Hospital, Rotherham, UK;
^dS. Orsola-Malpighi Hospital, Bologna, Italy

Address of Corresponding Author

Digestion 2007;75 (Suppl. 1):17-24 (DOI: 10.1159/000101078)

  Key Words

• GERD
• Questionnaire
• Scale
• ReQuest
• Construction

  Abstract

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide, and it is becoming increasingly important to monitor the effect of various interventions on GERD symptoms. There can be rapid temporal changes in the severity and frequency of patients' symptoms as well as their health status and well-being, all of which could, theoretically, be monitored using diaries or questionnaires. However, current GERD monitoring instruments are not appropriate because they do not assess symptoms daily, they are not sufficiently responsive to short-term changes in health status or they are not adequately validated. To address these problems, the conceptual and psychometric requirements for a GERD symptom assessment questionnaire were identified. A dimension-based scale was designed to reduce the number of symptoms monitored on a daily basis, and the validation process was defined to produce parallel long and short forms of a scale for patients' self-assessment of their GERD symptom response to therapy. These basic principles which underlie the successful development of a new, self-assessed symptomatic reflux questionnaire (ReQuest) are also applicable to the development of validated questionnaires for daily symptom self- assessment in other disease areas.

Copyright © 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel

  Author Contacts

David Armstrong
HSC-4W8, Division of Gastroenterology, McMaster University
1200 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 3Z5 (Canada)
Tel. +1 905 521 2100 (Operator) or +1 905 521 2100, ext. 76404 (Sarah Lawson)
Fax +1 905 521 4958, E-Mail armstro@mcmaster.ca

  Article Information

Published online: May 4, 2007
Number of Print Pages : 8
Number of Figures : 0, Number of Tables : 0, Number of References : 22