The validity and reliability of a screening questionnaire for Parkinson's disease in a community.

OBJECTIVES

Parkinson's disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in the elderly population. In order to estimate the prevalence of Parkinson's disease in the community, the application of a good screening tool is essential. We evaluated the validity and reliability of a Parkinson's disease screening questionnaire and propose an alternative measure to improve its validity for use in community surveys.

METHODS

We designed the study in a three-phase approach consisting of a screening questionnaire, neurologic examination, and confirmatory examination. A repeated survey was administered to patients with disease detected in the community and on 150 subjects. We examined internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha test, test-retest reliability using the kappa statistic, and validity using sensitivity, specificity, and ROC curves. Unadjusted odds ratios were utilized for the estimation of weights for each questionnaire item.

RESULTS

The Cronbach's alpha of the questionnaire was 0.708. The kappa statistic for test-retest reliability was good to generally fair in most of the items. When newly proposed weighting scores were used, the optimum cut-off value was 7/8. When cut-off value was 5/6 for surveying prevalence in a community, the sensitivity was 0.98, and the specificity was 0.61, with simultaneous improvement in reliability.

CONCLUSIONS

We recommend 5/6 as the ideal cut-off value for the survey of PD prevalence in community. This questionnaire designed for the Korean community could help future epidemiologic studies of PD.