Development Of A Health-related Quality Of Life Questionnaire For Adults With Anisometropic Amblyopia

Purposes: To develop a health-related quality of life questionnaire(HRQOL)for adult patients with anisometropic amblyopia.Methods: Individual patient interviews generated 80 questionnaire items.For item reduction,we asked 40 adult patients with anisometropic amblyopia to complete the80-item questionnaire and analyzed responses.Then we performed factor analysis.Two prominent factors were identified,and the 10 items with the highest correlation with each factor were selected.The reliability of the questionnaire was evaluated by Cronbach’s α coefficient.A 5-point Likert-type scale was used for responses(‘never’=100,‘rarely’=75,‘sometimes’ =50,‘often’=25,and ‘always’ =0).The overall and sub-scale scores were the average scores of all included items,ranging from 0(worst HRQOL)to 100(best HRQOL).The final 20-item questionnaire was administered to an additional 100 adult patients with anisometropic amblyopia,100 adult patients with other eye diseases and 100 visually normal adults.Mean overall and sub-scale scores were compared across groups.Results: The final adult anisometropic amblyopia questionnaire(AAAQ)consists of two subscales: the function subscale and the psychosocial subscale,each containing 10 items.The Cronbach’s α coefficients of the overall,function subscale and psychosocial subscale were 0.822,0.778 and 0.783.The mean scores of overall(28.63±9.18),function subscale(27.69±9.88)and psychosocial subscale(29.53±9.90)for adult patients with anisometropic amblyopia were significantly lower compared to adult patients with other eye diseases(71.28±8.14,P<0.001;65.56±7.81,P<0.001;76.85±10.76,P < 0.001)and visually normal adults(84.54±9.13,P < 0.001;81.70±9.27,P<0.001;87.38±10.06,P<0.001).Conclusion: The questionnaire meets the requirements for validity and reliability of HRQOL questionnaire,and can be used to assess HRQOL of adult patients with anisometropic amblyopia.