50
Views
5
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Reliability of assessment of urgency and other symptoms indicating anal sphincter, large bowel or urinary dysfunction

, , & , PhD , MD
Pages 397-408 | Received 17 Oct 2005, Published online: 09 Jul 2009
 

Abstract

Objective. The Radiumhemmets Scale of Disease-Specific Symptom Assessment—Prostate Cancer has been used in several studies. However, no test–retest reliability study of it has been conducted concerning the assessment of urinary, anal sphincter or large bowel function. The aim of this study was to evaluate the reliability of items assessing these functions. Material and methods. We investigated 89 prostate cancer patients randomly selected from a group of patients diagnosed in Stockholm. The patients answered 24 questions assessing anal sphincter, large bowel and urinary function twice, with a 3-week interval in-between, to assess reliability. Results. Most of the questions assessing bowel and urinary symptoms showed substantial or near-perfect agreement. The kappa value for bowel symptom items was ≥0.60 for all items, except for defecation urgency (0.40–0.55). The kappa value for urinary symptom items varied between 0.43 and 1.0, except for urinary urgency (0.30–0.39). Conclusions. When comparing the impact of different symptoms of anal sphincter, large bowel or urinary tract dysfunction, it may be important to consider that defecation urgency and urinary urgency have the highest measuring error (low reliability). This error dilutes assessed associations with, for example, decreased quality of life. Nevertheless, the test–retest reliability for anal sphincter, large bowel and urinary symptoms indicates that surveys yield meaningful information.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access
  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 65.00 Add to cart
* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.