West China Hospital Set of Measures in Chinese to Evaluate Back Pain Treatment

Objective: Chinese is the most commonly spoken language in the world, and back pain is as prevalent in China as it is elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of measures in Chinese to evaluate back pain treatment. We assemble a set of Chinese measures to evaluate outcomes in diverse domains. A set of measures is necessary, because measures in one domain may vary independently from measures in another. Chinese measures are in four domains: pain intensity, global rating of improvement, physical disability, and emotional functioning. The Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) represents the domain of physical disability, and both the World Health Organization Five-Item Well-being Index (WHO-5) and the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D depression scale) represent the domain of emotional functioning.

Design: Measures were cross-culturally adapted into Chinese. The development of Chinese versions of the ODI, the WHO-5, and the CES-D entailed psychometric evaluation. Additionally, we administered the previously validated Chinese SF-36 to evaluate the validity of measures in our set.

Setting: The western-style Pain Clinic and the Acupuncture Clinic of West China Hospital (Chengdu, Sichuan Province).

Patients: Eighty-six patients with nonspecific back pain.

Results: We found no significant differences between patients from the Pain Clinic and those from the Acupuncture Clinic. For the ODI, the CES-D, and the WHO-5, we evaluated the psychometric properties of reliability, validity, and ceiling and floor effects. We found these properties to be good to excellent.

Conclusions: In the Appendix (available online, in supplemental materials for this article), we present the West China Hospital set of measures in Chinese to evaluate back pain treatment.