Chinese translation of the Coma Recovery Scale—Revised

ABSTRACT

Background: Misdiagnosis rate is high in patients with disorders of consciousness, potentially leading to an inappropriate clinical management of these patients. Sensitive standardised rating scales offer some protections from these diagnostic errors. In this context, the use of the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) has strongly been recommended by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Objective: Here, we present the work that has been performed to translate this important diagnostic tool in Chinese. Methods: The scale has been translated from its original English version to Chinese by a team of native Chinese speakers in agreement with an expert highly trained in the use of the original version of the CRS-R and, then, back-translated to English by four independent translators blinded to the original version. The resulting translation has been sent to the original author for final approval. Results and conclusion: The Chinese version of the CRS-R is now available for use in clinical practise. Further investigations will nevertheless be needed in order to show that its psychometric properties are identical to the original English version.

KEYWORDS:

• Brain injury
• consciousness
• vegetative state
• minimally conscious state
• behavioural scale
• translation

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Joseph T. Giacino (original author of the CRS-R) [6] and his team at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital (Boston, MA, USA) for their feedback on the translation of the scale.

Declaration of interest

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81471100), the Research Fund for International Young Scientists of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (811247008) and the Program for Excellent Young Teachers in Hangzhou Normal University (JTAS 2011-01-016).