Adaptação transcultural do instrumento Cognitive Symptom Checklist-Work-21 (CSC-W21) para o contexto brasileiro

Abstract

Introduction: Cancer is a chronic disease, with increasing survival rates, but still with a decrease in quality of life, due to the long term adverse effects such as physical changes, depression, fatigue, and difficulties related to work, reducing their productive capacity and leading to difficulties in maintaining and returning to the labor market after treatment. Therefore there is a need to better understand possible limitations, including daily life and cognitive functions. Thus, the object of this study was the Cognitive Symptom Checklist-Work-21 (CSC-W21), an instrument developed to assess the challenges reported at work involving specific cognitive functions of breast cancer survivors. The main objective was to perform the cross-cultural adaptation of the CSC-W21 to the Brazilian Portuguese and to begin the evaluation of its psychometric properties. As secondary objectives were defined: to analyze semantic, idiomatic, conceptual and experimental equivalence, besides verifying evidences of content validity in its the new version. Method: psychometric, cross-sectional and descriptive study. The 11 steps determined for cross-cultural adaptation of health measuring tools were fulfilled, according to the most current recommendations in the international literature. For the equivalence analysis, the agreement index was used and, to verify the evidences of content validity from the experts' evaluation for clarity, pertinence, relevance, and dimension in the writing of each item, the Content Validity Ratio was calculated. The research scenario was a federal public hospital specialized in oncology, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The participants in the cognitive (or pretest) phase were women in the labor market before the diagnosis of breast cancer, whether formal or informal, who had completed chemotherapy for at least two years. The study was approved by the Institution’s Research Ethics Committee on January 23, 2019, under protocol #3.119.099. All participants signed the Informed Consent Form, receiving its copy. Results: The equivalence analysis resulted in a 96.87% agreement rate among experts above 80%. All items that received some kind of suggestion were reviewed. Regarding the evidences of content validity, the instrument presented good results for a version with 22 items. Regarding the assessment by participants of the cognitive test phase, 96.6% reported no difficulty in its comprehension during the completion of the instrument. Conclusion: The Brazilian version of the CSC-W21 is entitled Lista de verificação de sintomas cognitivos relacionados ao trabalho – 22 itens, and provides good evidence of content validity for identifying the occurrence of cognitive symptoms among working women two years after treatment for breast cancer.