gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Vertigo and dizziness are common symptoms in current ENT practice. Individual perception on health can be assessed only by questionnaires about quality of life. Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI) is a quality of life questionnaire widely used by specialists, validated in many languages. Our work aims were the translation, trans-national adaptation and validation of this questionnaire in Romanian language.

Methods: The questionnaire was translated into Romanian following the regular procedures and then applied to a group of 50 patients complaining vertigo, dizziness or unsteadiness. There were excluded from this study all the patients who had complains due to cardiopulmonary diseases, musculoskeletal paresis, with psychiatric disorders or blindness. The patients were asked to fill out also the SF-36 questionnaire and the results were compared.

Results: Cronbach’s alpha coefficient showed a high value of internal consistency of 0.86 for the global test. Corrected Item-Total Correlation between each item and the total score ranged from 0.218 and 0.745, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient ranging from 0.845 and 0.863. External validity was tested by Pearson correlation between total score and subscales of DHI-Ro and SF-36 scores and its 8 subscales. The correlation between the total score of the two questionnaires was -0.536 (p=0.00). Reassessment of patients after 1 month of treatment showed a statistically significant change in DHI score, from 49.56 to 17.64, p=0.0

Conclusions: DHI-Ro is a translated and adapted questionnaire for Romanian-speaking patients, proving to be a reliable and valid tool, useful in evaluating patients who accuses vertigo, dizziness or instability and is a valuable tool for assessing the individual perception of the disease.

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