Validation of a Danish version of the Toronto Extremity Salvage Score questionnaire for patients with sarcoma in the extremities.

INTRODUCTION: The Toronto Extremity Salvage Score (TESS) questionnaire is a self-administered questionnaire designed to assess physical disability in patients having undergone surgery of the extremities. The aim of this study was to validate a Danish translation of the TESS.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: The TESS was translated according to international guidelines. A total of 22 consecutive patients attending the regular outpatient control programme were recruited for the study. To test their understanding of the questionnaires, they were asked to describe the meaning of five randomly selected questions from the TESS. The psychometric properties of the Danish version of TESS were tested for validity and reliability. To assess the test-retest reliability, the patients filled in an extra TESS questionnaire one week after they had completed the first one.

RESULTS: Patients showed good understanding of the questionnaire. There was a good internal consistency for both the upper and lower questionnaire measured by Cronbach's alpha. A Bland-Altman plot showed acceptable limits of agreement for both questionnaires in the test-retest. There was also good intraclass correlation coefficients for both questionnaires. The validity expressed as Spearman's rank correlation coefficient comparing the TESS with the QLQ-C30 was 0.89 and 0.90 for the questionnaire on upper and lower extremities, respectively.

CONCLUSION: The psychometric properties of the Danish TESS showed good validity and reliability.

FUNDING: not relevant.

TRIAL REGISTRATION: not relevant.