• Stefanie Schmidt, Ricard Riel, Albert Frances, José Antonio Lorente Garin, Xavier Bonfill, María José Martinez-Zapata, Maria Morales Suarez-Varela, Javier dela Cruz, José Ignacio Emparanza, María-José Sánchez, Javier Zamora, Juan Manuel Ramos Goñi, Jordi Alonso, Montse Ferrer, and EMPARO-CU Study Group.
• Health Services Research Group, IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute), Doctor Aiguader 88, 08003 Barcelona, Spain. mferrer@imim.es.
• Health Qual Life Out. 2014 Feb 15; 12: 20.

BackgroundThe Bladder Cancer Index (BCI) is so far the only instrument applicable across all bladder cancer patients, independent of tumor infiltration or treatment applied. We developed a Spanish version of the BCI, and assessed its acceptability and metric properties.MethodsFor the adaptation into Spanish we used the forward and back-translation method, expert panels, and cognitive debriefing patient interviews. For the assessment of metric properties we used data from 197 bladder cancer patients from a multi-center prospective study. The Spanish BCI and the SF-36 Health Survey were self-administered before and 12 months after treatment. Reliability was estimated by Cronbach's alpha. Construct validity was assessed through the multi-trait multi-method matrix. The magnitude of change was quantified by effect sizes to assess responsiveness.ResultsReliability coefficients ranged 0.75-0.97. The validity analysis confirmed moderate associations between the BCI function and bother subscales for urinary (r = 0.61) and bowel (r = 0.53) domains; conceptual independence among all BCI domains (r ≤ 0.3); and low correlation coefficients with the SF-36 scores, ranging 0.14-0.48. Among patients reporting global improvement at follow-up, pre-post treatment changes were statistically significant for the urinary domain and urinary bother subscale, with effect sizes of 0.38 and 0.53.ConclusionsThe Spanish BCI is well accepted, reliable, valid, responsive, and similar in performance compared to the original instrument. These findings support its use, both in Spanish and international studies, as a valuable and comprehensive tool for assessing quality of life across a wide range of bladder cancer patients.

19 keywords...

hide…