Abstracts

Quality of Life in Epilepsy[ndash]31 (QOLIE-31) has been the most worldwide used instrument due to its concise and easy evaluation. The objective of this work is to describe the cultural adaptation and psychometric properties of the QOLIE-31 for the Portuguese language., This study involved 150 outpatients: 50 pre-surgical patients with diagnosis of refractory temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) due to mesial temporal sclerosis (MTS); fifty with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) and uncontrolled seizures; and 50 seizure-free TLE patients, with seizure remission of at least 6 months. The patients completed the following questionnaires: QOLIE-31, Nottingham Health Profile (NHP), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Adverse Events Profile (AEP) and a neuropsychological evaluation. Patients answered the QOLIE-31 twice on the first day (interviewers 1 and 2) and after 7 days (interviewer 1). Translation and cultural adaptation into Portuguese had the following phases: translation into Portuguese by two independent parallel translators; back-translation by two independent native English-speaking teachers, fluent in Portuguese; creation of a final version by a panel of experts. This was tested in a study including 30 outpatients with epilepsy., One question needed modification: item 28 needed complementary information. It was added: [italic][ldquo]Social Limitations, in other words, fell that you can[apos]t go out or live together with different people[rdquo].[/italic] Among the 150 subjects (53% women) the mean age was 31 and the mean duration of epilepsy was 15 years. Concerning socio-demographic characteristics, 59 (39%) had primary school, 68 (45%) secondary and 23 (16%) higher education. In relation to seizure [italic]frequency, [/italic]68 (52%) had no seizures in the last 6 months, 53 (35%) 1-5, 15 (10%) 6-10 and 4 (3%) more than 10/month. High internal consistency showed by Cronbach[apos]s alpha coefficient ranging from 0.746 to 0.932. Inter-rater reliability was strong with ICC ranging from 0.933 (Overall Quality of Life) to 0.997 (Medication Effects, Seizure Worry and Social Function). After one week, the reliability was also high with ICC ranging from 0.917 (Overall Quality of Life) to 0.995 (Medication Effects). There was a high association between QOLIE-31 and BDI (Spearmann[apos]s correlations) (p[le] 0.005). QOLIE-31 and NHP had an association as well as neuropsychological evaluation. The [italic]responsiveness[/italic] of QOLIE-31 between the groups showed significant changes (p[gt]0.005)., Our results support the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the QOLIE-31 as a measure of HRQL., (Supported by FAPESP (Funda[ccedil][atilde]o de Amparo [agrave] Pesquisa do Estado de S[atilde]o Paulo).)