Reliability, validity and responsiveness of the Kurdish version of the questionnaire Disability of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome

• Published in: Medical journal of Malaysia Vol. 79; no. Suppl 1; pp. 47 - 52
• Main Authors: Rebwar, A H, Omer, A R, Jalal, A H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Malaysia 01.03.2024
• Subjects: Arm; Blindness; Carpal Tunnel Syndrome - diagnosis; Disability Evaluation; Humans; Reproducibility of Results; Shoulder; Surveys and Questionnaires; Upper Extremity
• ISSN: 0300-5283

The Disabilities of Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) questionnaire predicts the amount of the patient's inabilities and symptoms to evaluate the impacts of upper limb conditions in the patient's daily-life activities. This study aims to test the psychometric properties of DASH in Kurdish patients with carpal tunnel syndrome. 93 patients with diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome subjected to complete the self-report DASH-KU and patient rated wrist\hand evaluation PRWHEKU questionnaire during two consecutive assessments with a 24-hour interval before any intervention. DASH-KU questionnaire had excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.99) and test-retest reliability (intra-class correlation coefficient =0.99). A strong correlation between the DASH-KU score and the PRWHE tool (r=0.792) demonstrated acceptable construct validity of DASH-KU. Bland-Altman plot showed good agreement between the two assessments of DASH-KU, and no floor (3%) nor ceiling effects (0%) were observed. Factor analysis showed that the DASH-KU scale had a high acceptable adequacy (adequacy index = 0.700) and a significant sphericity (p<0.001). The analysis showed a major factor that accounted for 40% of the observed variance with an eigenvalue of 13.14. In addition, five items model also explained 81.23% of the DASH-KU scale variance. However, the responsiveness of DASH-KU was suboptimum, which can be linked to the short 24-hour interval between measurements. The DASH-KU scale is a reliable, valid, and responsive instrument for assessing disabilities in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome.