[Development of a quality of life instrument for evaluation of the quality of life scale for Chinese patients with oral cancer].

PURPOSE: To develop a quality of life instrument for Chinese patients with oral cancer and to assess its reliability, validity and sensitivity. METHODS: A 44-item QOL questionnaire was developed with reference to the 36-item medical outcomes study on short-form health status (SF-36) and University of Washington Quality of Life Questionnaire (UW-QOL), combining with China's population and socio-cultural characteristics, named as Zhengzhou university oral cancer quality of life (ZZU-QOL) scale. Based on 271 patients, student's t test, correlation analysis, factor analysis were performed for its reliability and validity using SPSS 19.0 software package. RESULTS: Test-retest reliability: in all areas and for total score between 2 measurements of the correlation coefficient in the range of 0.86-1.00, there was no significant difference. Homogeneity reliability: Cornbrash'a coefficient in all fields was larger than 0.6, indicating the scale had good reliability. Construct validity: ZZU-QOL, SF-36 analysis and UW-QOL scale factor selected by the first seven cumulative contribution factor variance were 69.3%, 63.4% and 66.5%. The criterion validity with SF-36 and UW-QOL was 0.768 and 0.634, respectively. The ZZU-QOL scale can sensitively distinguish differences in preoperative and postoperative quality of life of oral cancer. CONCLUSIONS: The ZZU-QOL scale is practical, reliable and valid, and might be used for measuring the quality of life in Chinese patients with oral cancer.