Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 8, 2021
Date Accepted: Nov 30, 2022
Real-time symptom assessment in patients with endometriosis: Psychometric evaluation of an electronic Patient Reported Outcome Measure, based on the Experience Sampling Method.
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) holds advantages over traditional retrospective questionnaires including a high ecological validity, no recall bias, the ability to assess fluctuation of symptoms and the ability to analyse the temporal relationship between variables.
Objective:
This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of an endometriosis-specific ESM tool.
Methods:
This is a short-term follow-up prospective study, including premenopausal endometriosis patients aged ≥18 years that reported dysmenorrhea, chronic pelvic pain or dyspareunia between December 2019 and November 2020. An ESM-based questionnaire was sent out by a smartphone application ten times a day during one week on randomly chosen moments. Additionally, patients completed questionnaires concerning demographics, end-of-day pain scores, and end-of-week symptom scores. The psychometric evaluation included compliance, concurrent validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability.
Results:
Twenty-eight endometriosis patients completed the study. Compliance for answering the ESM questions was as high as 52%. End-of-week pain scores were higher compared to ESM mean scores and showed peak-reporting. ESM scores showed strong concurrent validity when compared to symptoms scored by the GSRS-IBS, GAD-7, PHQ-9 and the majority of questions of the EHP-30. Cronbach’s α coefficients demonstrated a good internal consistency for abdominal symptoms, general somatic symptoms and positive affect and an excellent internal consistency for negative affect. Moreover, excellent test-retest reliability was shown.
Conclusions:
The current study supports the validity and reliability of a newly developed electronic instrument for the measurement of symptoms in women with endometriosis, based on momentary assessments. This ESM-PROM has the advantage of a more detailed view on individual symptom patterns and can offer the possibility of self-insight of patients in their symptomatology, leading to more individualized treatment strategies which can improve the quality of life of women suffering from endometriosis. Clinical Trial: Not applicable.
Citation
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