Validation of the Persian version of COOP/WONCA functional health status charts in liver transplant candidates.

CONTEXT

Health-related quality of life is a preferred outcome measure for patients with advanced liver disease. The functional health status charts developed by the Dartmouth Primary Care Cooperative Information Project (COOP)/World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations (WONCA) make up a generic instrument for assessing health-related quality of life.

OBJECTIVE

To translate and validate the Persian version of COOP/WONCA in liver transplant candidates and to assess the correlation of Child Pugh classification and Model of End Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score with quality of life.Setting-The Shiraz liver transplant center, the most active liver transplant center in the Middle East.

PARTICIPANTS

Consecutive adult outpatients waiting for their first liver transplant who attended follow-up visits in the pretransplant clinic.Main Outcome Measures-Patients completed COOP/WONCA along with the Short Form (SF)-36. Data on the underlying cause of cirrhosis, Child-Pugh classification, and MELD scores were collected from medical records.

RESULTS

A Persian version of the COOP/WONCA was accepted by liver transplant candidates and showed adequate reliability and validity. Similar domains in COOP/WONCA charts and the SF-36 were highly correlated, indicating that construct validity of the COOP/WONCA in relation to the SF-36 was good (77% of correlations were as expected). Moreover, the exploratory factor analysis could not extract 2 different quality-of-life factors. These findings provide sufficient evidence to conclude that the Persian versions of COOP/WONCA charts and the SF-36 measure the same constructs of health-related quality of life and can be used interchangeably. Four of the 6 COOP/WONCA charts did not allow discrimination between groups of patients according to Child Pugh classification, indicating poor known group validity.