A short psychosocial questionnaire for patients with Parkinson's disease: the SCOPA-PS

Received 7 March 2002; received in revised form 20 October 2002; accepted 31 October 2002.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop a short questionnaire for psychosocial functioning in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The SCales for Outcomes in Parkinson's disease—PsychoSocial questionnaire (SCOPA-PS) was tested in a survey and compared with other instruments and with medical information. This survey was sent to 205 patents with idiopathic PD. Eighty-six percent of the questionnaires were returned. Cronbach's α was 0.83. Two-week test-retest reliability was 0.85 (intraclass correlation coefficient). Construct validity with other scales (Spearman's rho) was 0.82 for the Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire—39-item version (PDQ-39), 0.76 for the PDQ-8, 0.69 for the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, −0.61 for the Euroqol, and −0.60 for a visual analogue scale evaluating Quality-of-Life. The summary index revealed a significant increase with increasing disease severity. The SCOPA-PS is a new, short psychosocial questionnaire for patients with PD with good clinimetric properties.

Keywords: Parkinson disease, Quality of Life, Clinimetrics, Psychosocial, SCOPA

a Department of Neurology, Leiden University Medical Center K5 Q 92, P.O. Box 9600, NL - 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands

b Neuroepidemiology Unit, Department of Applied Epidemiology, National Center for Epidemiology I.S. Carlos III, C/Sinesio Delgado 6, 28029 Madrid, Spain

c Department of Medical Decision Making, Leiden University Medical Center, K6 R, Albinusdreef 2, 2333 ZA Leiden, The Netherlands

Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 71 526 2547; fax: +31 71 524 8253.

PII: S0895-4356(02)00569-3

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