Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Pain sensitivity level is correlated with the treatment outcomes for individuals. Although pain perception, patient's personality and attitude have a great role, fear of pain may halt individuals from seeking treatment. This study aimed to translate pain sensitivity questionnaires (PSQ) into the Arabic language, perform a cross-cultural adaption of the PSQ, and validate the Arabic version of PSQ in healthy patients. Methodology: The PSQ was translated forward and backward following cross-cultural adaptation guidelines. The Arabic version of the PSQ was tested on 50 healthy patients. Test-retest reliability and intraclass correlation coefficient was used to check the reliability, additionally; Cronbach's alpha and factor analysis was used to estimate the internal consistency. Results: The mean PSQ-total, PSQ-moderate, and PSQ-minor were 4.86 ± 1.54, 6.12 ± 1.62, and 3.56 ± 1.79 respectively. A very good internal consistency was shown for the PSQ- total, PSQ-moderate, and PSQ-minor of the Arabic version as determined by Cronbach's Alpha (0.918, 0.881, and 0.867, respectively). For convergent validity, the PSQ scores of the Arabic version showed significant correlations with pain catastrophizing scale (PCS) (r = 0.506, P < 0.001; r = 0.466, P = 0.001; r = 0.407, P = 0.003 for PSQ-total, PSQ-moderate, and PSQ-minor of the Arabic version, respectively). For test-retest reliability which was evaluated in an interval of 4 weeks, the intraclass correlation coefficients were 0.928, 0.948 and 0.842 for PSQ-total, PSQ-moderate, and PSQ-minor respectively. Conclusions: the validated current Arabic version of PSQ is a cross-culturally equivalent and reliable tool for pain sensitivity assessment.
Keywords: Pain, pain sensitivity questionnaire, cross-cultural, validity, reliability, Arabic, Arabic translation, pain sensitivity, assessment of pain
Introduction
Changes in pain sensitivity level among patients is well known related to individual treatment outcomes (1,2) and that increased pain sensitivity and perception may be considered as a determining factor for chronic pain development (3). Pain sensitivity levels have a clinical significance on patients' postoperative pain; the postoperative pain level was correlated with the pre-operative pain sensitivity scores, which has an effect on the consumption levels of postoperative analgesics (4-7).
Several chronic pain disorders developed in relation to pain sensitivity such as tension-type headache, chronic low back pain, and chronic temporomandibular joint dysfunction as shown in many previous studies (8, 9). Moreover, higher pain sensitivity may also...