Measuring health-related quality of life in women with urogenital dysfunction: the urogenital distress inventory and incontinence impact questionnaire revisited.

AIMS: Symptoms of urogenital dysfunction are known to negatively affect health-related quality of life in women. To assess effectiveness of treatment, it is currently recommended to include measurements of quality of life in outcome analysis. One of the questionnaires that is commonly used is the combination of the Urogenital Distress Inventory (UDI) and Incontinence Impact Questionnaire (IIQ). Unfortunately, the validity of the UDI and IIQ has only been tested in highly selected subgroups of female patients. Therefore, it is unclear whether this questionnaire is suitable for use in populations with different characteristics.
METHODS: We analyzed the scale construction and validity of the UDI and IIQ in a random sample of 2,042 women, aged 20-70 years old and a clinical sample of 196 women.
RESULTS: Our results show that the UDI can be divided into five subscales, namely discomfort/pain, urinary incontinence, overactive bladder, genital prolapse, and obstructive micturition. The internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) ranged between 0.74 and 0.82. In addition to the original four subscales of the IIQ (mobility, physical, social, and emotional functioning), we identified a fifth subscale with four items about embarrassment. Internal consistency of these subscales ranged between 0.83 and 0.93. In addition to the internal consistency, we tested the criterion and construct validity of these new subscale division.
CONCLUSIONS: We found these subscales to be reliable and of clinical use. It is recommended to use the revised UDI and IIQ in outcome analysis of treatments for urogenital symptoms in women. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.