High recall bias in retrospective assessment of the pediatric International Knee Documentation Committee Questionnaire (Pedi-IKDC) in children with knee pathologies

Abstract

Purpose The increasing incidence of knee injuries among children is well known by sports physicians. Papers dealing with this topic have often collected patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs) in a retrospective manner; this limitation could lead to a misinterpretation of the results, because pediatric patients might not remember their preoperative conditions adequately. This study aims to evaluate the reliability and the reproducibility of the IKDC pediatric score when administered retrospectively at a 12-month follow-up. Methods From September 2018 and June 2019, all patients aged 7-18 scheduled for surgery due to diferent knee pathologies in a single center were considered eligible. Parents were contacted by phone for consent. An open-source platform was implemented to collect the responses: two surveys were created (Q1, Q2). They included general information and the Pedi-IKDC score. Q1 was completed prospectively, while Q2 was completed 12 months after surgery. The two questionnaires were identical, and patients were carefully advised to complete Q2 recalling their health status before surgery. ICC and the concordance correlation coeicient (ρ c ) were used to assess the reproducibility between the prospective and recalled scores. Results Sixty-six patients responded to Q1 and Q2, and the mean age was 12.9 ± 2.2 years at Q1 and 14.1 ± 2.2 years at Q2. The mean time between Q1 and Q2 was 14.1 ± 2.1 months. Between prospective-IKDC and recall-IKDC, the ICC coeicient was "poor" at 0.32 (CI 0.09 to 0.5) and the ρ c was "poor" at 0.4 (CI 0.29 to 0.51). Mean prospective-IKDC was 76.8 ± 23.52 mean recalled-IKDC was 60.4 ± 11.5 (P < 0.0001), while mean diference was -16.3 ± 2.09. Simple linear regression models showed that Δ-IKDC is independently associated with age at Q1 (R 2 = 0.2676; P0.0001) and prospective-IKDC (R 2 = 0.653; P < 0.0001). Conclusions Retrospective collection of the Pedi-IKDC score is not reliable and has high recall bias. This should be avoided in children with knee conditions. Level of evidence III.

The impact of COVID-19 on individuals with ASD in the US: Parent perspectives on social and support concerns

“…Due to the retrospective nature of the survey, there is also a possibility of recall bias in parent reporting. For example, studies have shown greater recall bias from participants with poorer outcomes, as well as decreased ability to recall accurately over longer time periods [ 54 ]. As this survey only required parents to recall information and emotions from only a few months prior, this is not likely to have as large of an effect on our study as it would have if the survey was completed further from the start of the pandemic.…”

The Indirect Effect of Sleep Quality on Stress-Related Psychosocial Outcomes in Adolescents: An Investigation Across Genders

“…Larger, more gender-diverse samples will be necessary to investigate the sleep experience for non-binary adolescents. Third, our study relied on self-report measures, which are subject to reporter and recall bias (Macchiarola et al, 2022). Speci cally, we recommend that future work assessing the mechanistic role of sleep employ objective measures of sleep (e.g., consumer-grade wearable devices, actigraphy watches, etc.).…”

Prevalence of tinnitus and hyperacusis in 9–12-year-old children

“…Future studies might consider providing an introductory movie to introduce some difficult terms (e.g., tinnitus, hyperacusis, hearing protection, and speech understanding) and provide information on how to fill out the survey. Moreover, efforts should be made to minimize the recall bias (e.g., asking questions about the last days), as younger is correlated with less recall accuracy [ 18 , 30 ].…”