Validation of a short form Wisconsin Upper Respiratory Symptom Survey (WURSS-21)

Abstract

BackgroundThe Wisconsin Upper Respiratory Symptom Survey (WURSS) is an illness-specific health-related quality-of-life questionnaire outcomes instrument.ObjectivesResearch questions were: 1) How well does the WURSS-21 assess the symptoms and functional impairments associated with common cold? 2) How well can this instrument measure change over time (responsiveness)? 3) What is the minimal important difference (MID) that can be detected by the WURSS-21? 4) What are the descriptive statistics for area under the time severity curve (AUC)? 5) What sample sizes would trials require to detect MID or AUC criteria? 6) What does factor analysis tell us about the underlying dimensional structure of the common cold? 7) How reliable are items, domains, and summary scores represented in WURSS? 8) For each of these considerations, how well does the WURSS-21 compare to the WURSS-44, Jackson, and SF-8?Study Design and SettingPeople with Jackson-defined colds were recruited from the community in and around Madison, Wisconsin. Participants were enrolled within 48 hours of first cold symptom and monitored for up to 14 days of illness. Half the sample filled out the WURSS-21 in the morning and the WURSS-44 in the evening, with the other half reversing the daily order. External comparators were the SF-8, a 24-hour recall general health measure yielding separate physical and mental health scores, and the eight-item Jackson cold index, which assesses symptoms, but not functional impairment or quality of life.ResultsIn all, 230 participants were monitored for 2,457 person-days. Participants were aged 14 to 83 years (mean 34.1, SD 13.6), majority female (66.5%), mostly white (86.0%), and represented substantive education and income diversity. WURSS-21 items demonstrated similar performance when embedded within the WURSS-44 or in the stand-alone WURSS-21. Minimal important difference (MID) and Guyatt's responsiveness index were 10.3, 0.71 for the WURSS-21 and 18.5, 0.75 for the WURSS-44. Factorial analysis suggested an eight dimension structure for the WURSS-44 and a three dimension structure for the WURSS-21, with composite reliability coefficients ranging from 0.87 to 0.97, and Cronbach's alpha ranging from 0.76 to 0.96. Both WURSS versions correlated significantly with the Jackson scale (W-21 R = 0.85; W-44 R = 0.88), with the SF-8 physical health (W-21 R = -0.79; W-44 R = -0.80) and SF-8 mental health (W-21 R = -0.55; W-44 R = -0.60).ConclusionThe WURSS-44 and WURSS-21 perform well as illness-specific quality-of-life evaluative outcome instruments. Construct validity is supported by the data presented here. While the WURSS-44 covers more symptoms, the WURSS-21 exhibits similar performance in terms of reliability, responsiveness, importance-to-patients, and convergence with other measures.

Placebo Effects and the Common Cold: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Power estimates were informed by data collected during our previously published echinacea trial 41 and by validation studies on the WURSS-21 instrument. [43][44][45][46] The effects of assignment to placebo-related and clinician-related treatment groups were tested using analysis of variance (ANOVA), analysis of covariance, and multivariate regression. Assessment and response to missing data followed Schafer's approach.…”

Carga interna de treinamento e respostas comportamentais em jovens ginastas

“…Para avaliar a severidade de ITRS utilizouse a versão em português do questionário (MOREIRA; CAVAZZONI, 2009;RUSHALL, 1990), originalmente proposto por Barrett et al (2009). O questionário WURSS-21 aborda questões globais sobre a severidade de episódios de ITRS e inclui 1 questão global, 10 questões sobre sintomas, 9 sobre limitações funcionais e 1 questão sobre a mudança global (BARRETT et al, 2009).…”

“…O questionário WURSS-21 aborda questões globais sobre a severidade de episódios de ITRS e inclui 1 questão global, 10 questões sobre sintomas, 9 sobre limitações funcionais e 1 questão sobre a mudança global (BARRETT et al, 2009). Uma escala (Likert) de sete pontos foi utilizada para avaliar a severidade de cada sintoma relatado: 1 (muito levemente), 3 (levemente), 5 (moderado), e 7 (severamente).…”

“…Quando algum sintoma não estava presente, o escore do item era preenchido como zero. A pontuação dos sintomas gerais foi calculada a partir da soma das severidades dos 10 sintomas e 9 limitações funcionais (BARRETT et al, 2009;SPENCE et al, 2007). Essa pontuação foi retida para análise e denominada "severidade".…”

It Sounds Like You Have a Cold! Testing Voice Features for the Interspeech 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Cold Challenge

“…The training and testing corpus (URTIC) was provided by the Institute of Safety Technology, University of Wuppertal, Germany and consisted of recordings of 630 subjects made in quiet rooms. Each speaker completed a health questionnaire (WURSS24) [1] that contains 22 seven-point Likert scale questions related to symptoms of the common cold. Speakers with a mean score greater than or equal to 6 were classed as having a cold, others as not having a cold.…”