Item and scale differential functioning of the Mini-Mental State Exam assessed using the Differential Item and Test Functioning (DFIT) Framework. (73/428)

OBJECTIVES: To illustrate the application of the Differential Item and Test Functioning (DFIT) method using English and Spanish versions of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). SUBJECTS: Study participants were 65 years of age or older and lived in North Manhattan, New York. Of the 1578 study participants who were administered the MMSE 665 completed it in Spanish. MEASURES: : The MMSE contains 20 items that measure the degree of cognitive impairment in the areas of orientation, attention and calculation, registration, recall and language, as well as the ability to follow verbal and written commands. RESEARCH DESIGN: After assessing the dimensionality of the MMSE scale, item response theory person and item parameters were estimated separately for the English and Spanish sample using Samejima's 2-parameter graded response model. Then the DFIT framework was used to assess differential item functioning (DIF) and differential test functioning (DTF). RESULTS: Nine items were found to show DIF; these were items that ask the respondent to name the correct season, day of the month, city, state, and 2 nearby streets, recall 3 objects, repeat the phrase no ifs, no ands, no buts, follow the command, "close your eyes," and the command, "take the paper in your right hand, fold the paper in half with both hands, and put the paper down in your lap." At the scale level, however, the MMSE did not show differential functioning. CONCLUSIONS: Respondents to the English and Spanish versions of the MMSE are comparable on the basis of scale scores. However, assessments based on individual MMSE items may be misleading.  (+info)

Reliability, validity and responsiveness of the fear-avoidance beliefs questionnaire: methodological aspects of the Norwegian version. (74/428)

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate reliability, validity and responsiveness of the Fear-Avoidance Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ) for use in Norwegian patients with low back pain. DESIGN: A prospective cohort study with 2 groups. PATIENTS: The questionnaire was tested in 123 patients with acute low back pain and 50 patients with chronic low back pain. METHODS: A translation and cross-cultural adaptation was performed. Test-retest reliability was assessed in 28 patients with chronic low back pain. Responsiveness was assessed in acute low back pain. RESULTS: Two factors for the FABQ were confirmed; fear-avoidance beliefs about work (FABQ-Work) and physical activity (FABQ-PA), accounting for 60% and 54% of the total variance in acute and chronic low back pain, respectively. For FABQ-Work and FABQ-PA internal consistency was 0.90 and 0.79, intra-class correlation coefficients 0.82 and 0.66, minimal detectable changes 12 and 9 points, and coefficients of variation were 16% and 23%. The FABQ correlated weakly to moderately with pain, disability, distress, and clinical variables. Standardized response means were low for FABQ-Work (0.32) and moderate (0.56) for FABQ-PA. Both FABQ subscales showed initially floor and/or ceiling effects. CONCLUSION: The Norwegian FABQ version had acceptable factor structure, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and construct validity. The responsiveness of the FABQ-Work was low, and for the FABQ-PA moderate, in the acute sample.  (+info)

Translation into Brazilian Portuguese, cultural adaptation and validation of the oral health impact profile (OHIP-49). (75/428)

The aim of this study is to develop a Portuguese version of the OHIP-49 to be used in Brazil. The adopted methodology involves translation, back-translation, revision of the first version, cultural adaptation and evaluation of its measurement properties. The questionnaire was administered in interviews with 60 year-old and older Brazilian people. The Kendall-tau correlation coefficient was used to assess reproducibility; the Cronbach alpha coefficient was used to verify internal consistency and the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to assess validity. Reproducibility was shown to be statistically significant, with coefficients ranging from 0.72 to 0.74 between dimensions of three interviews. The Cronbach alpha coefficients were 0.96 and 0.90 respectively for the dimensions of the interviews and for total items. Constructive validity, demonstrated through a comparison between the questionnaire dimensions and the clinical parameters, showed statistical significance for "presence of carious lesion" (p < 0.05). Significant correlations between similar dimensions of the OHIP-49 and the SF-36 were also identified (p < 0.05). In the present sample, the Portuguese version of the OHIP-49 presented results similar to those found in the literature and proved to be a reproducible and valid parameter for evaluating the impact of oral conditions on the quality of life of Brazilians.  (+info)

Interpreter services in an inner city teaching hospital: a 6-year experience. (76/428)

INTRODUCTION: Being able to communicate effectively with patients is essential not only from a medicolegal standpoint but more importantly from clinical governance perspectives. Issues such as informed consent and patient choice within the NHS are currently being highlighted; for these to be available to patients, their language requirements are paramount. PATIENTS AND METHODS: An audit was performed by the Linkworkers office at the Central Manchester & Manchester Children's Hospital NHS (CMMC) Trust on the total number of attendances and refusals per language in the period 1998-2003. RESULTS: In the CMMC Trust, Urdu/Punjabi, Bengali, Cantonese, Somali, Arabic and French represent the majority of the workload, comprising almost 80% of cases in 2003. In the same year, an increase in demand for languages of Eastern European countries became evident. Finding interpreters for these languages even via agencies can be extremely difficult. CONCLUSIONS: If the current trend continues, requirement for these services will increase exponentially. For this demand to be met adequately these issues must be kept at the forefront of NHS planning.  (+info)

Contribution to terminology internationalization by word alignment in parallel corpora. (77/428)

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Creating a complete translation of a large vocabulary is a time-consuming task, which requires skilled and knowledgeable medical translators. Our goal is to examine to which extent such a task can be alleviated by a specific natural language processing technique, word alignment in parallel corpora. We experiment with translation from English to French. METHODS: Build a large corpus of parallel, English-French documents, and automatically align it at the document, sentence and word levels using state-of-the-art alignment methods and tools. Then project English terms from existing controlled vocabularies to the aligned word pairs, and examine the number and quality of the putative French translations obtained thereby. We considered three American vocabularies present in the UMLS with three different translation statuses: the MeSH, SNOMED CT, and the MedlinePlus Health Topics. RESULTS: We obtained several thousand new translations of our input terms, this number being closely linked to the number of terms in the input vocabularies. CONCLUSION: Our study shows that alignment methods can extract a number of new term translations from large bodies of text with a moderate human reviewing effort, and thus contribute to help a human translator obtain better translation coverage of an input vocabulary. Short-term perspectives include their application to a corpus 20 times larger than that used here, together with more focused methods for term extraction.  (+info)

Overcoming terminology barrier using Web resources for cross-language medical information retrieval. (78/428)

A number of authoritative medical websites, such as PubMed and MedlinePlus, provide consumers with the most up-to-date health information. However, non-English speakers often encounter not only language barriers (from other languages to English) but also terminology barriers (from laypersons inverted exclamation mark| terms to professional medical terms) when retrieving information from these websites. Our previous work address language barriers by developing a multilingual medical thesaurus, Chinese-English MeSH, while this study presents an approach to overcome terminology barriers based on Web resources. Two techniques were utilized in our approach: monolingual concept mapping using approximate string matching and crosslingual concept mapping using Web resources. The evaluation shows that our approach can significantly improve the performance on MeSH concept mapping and cross-language medical information retrieval.  (+info)

Towards a multilingual medical lexicon. (79/428)

We present results of the collaboration of a multinational team of researchers from (computational) linguistics, medicine, and medical informatics with the goal of building a multilingual medical lexicon with high coverage and complete morpho-syntactic information. Monolingual lexical resources were collected and subsequently mapped between languages using a morpho-semantic term normalization engine, which captures intra- as well as interlingual synonymy relationships on the level of subwords.  (+info)

User study of a Spanish-language ClinicalTrials.gov prototype system. (80/428)

We conducted a user study of monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking consumers (n=36) to evaluate a Spanish-language ClinicalTrials.gov prototype. The prototype leverages an existing English-only consumer health resource by combining (1) Spanish-English cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and (2) English-Spanish document display techniques. We collected user feedback on expectations, usability, and satisfaction. Preliminary results suggest improved online information access by Spanish-speakers. The goal is to develop a general approach for other systems and languages.  (+info)