Development of a short form of the Hong Kong Chinese orebro musculoskeletal pain screening questionnaire.
Raymond C C Tsang, Edwin W C Lee, Jamie S Y Lau and 4 others
PMID 31156317WHAT IT FOUND
A short Chinese questionnaire for workers with back or neck pain took a few minutes and identified people likely to have long sick leave or not return to work, but it was less useful for neck pain.
Key findings
01The short form correlated strongly with the full questionnaire in both back pain and neck pain.
02A score above 54 was the optimal cut-off for predicting more than 60 days of sick leave, and a score of 54 or below was the optimal cut-off for predicting return to work.
03The short form took 3.2 minutes on average to complete.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
About 30% of participants were lost to one-year follow-up, so the predictive results may not apply to those who did not respond. Non-respondents with back pain were 3.5 years younger than respondents, so the follow-up group was not identical to the original group. The short form was created by extracting items from the full questionnaire, which may have introduced shared measurement error. It is unknown if the results would have differed if only the short form were administered. Sick leave and return-to-work status were self-reported and could not be verified objectively. The short form had lower internal consistency than the full form (0.757 versus 0.843 for back pain; 0.732 versus 0.826 for neck pain). The short form gives less clinical information than the full questionnaire and omits the coping concept area. Test-retest reliability used only 25 back pain and 12 neck pain patients who were stable one week after first attendance. The study used a local sick-leave threshold of more than 60 days, which may not match other settings. The neck pain predictions were less favourable than the back pain predictions.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest and no funding or external support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume the neck pain results are as strong as the back pain results. The short form predicted outcomes less well for neck pain.