Abstract: PD39-10
Sources of Funding: none

Introduction

Symptoms score are integral tools in urology allowing for assessment of severity of symptoms, progression of symptoms and efficacy of therapy, though they inherently depend on literacy and language interpretation. To extend the concept of the male Visual Prostate Symptom Score (VPSS), we proposed a female specific visual score that would circumvent literacy comprehension and provide validated symptom information on frequency, nocturia, urgency, stress urinary incontinence (SUI), dysuria and quality of life (QoL)._x000D_ Objectives: Develop the Visual Urinary Symptom Score for Women (VUSS) score and content validity by: (1) evaluate construct validity through patient understanding of each pictogram (2) comparing VUSS pictograms responses to the Urinary Distress Inventory (UDI-6) and the American Urological Associated Symptom Inventory (AUA-SI) (3) obtain patient input to enhance information capture._x000D_

Methods

English speaking women were recruited by posters in the Greater Vancouver Area. They completed the VUSS, the UDI-6 and the AUA-SI independently, described their interpretations of each pictogram and provided feedback for each image to improve comprehension. Statistical analysis: Students t, Fishers exact, and Spearmans correlation tests.

Results

300 scores in N=100 were collected (mean age 46, range 21-91); 25 had grade 8-12 high school education; 75 with postsecondary education (mean 4.2 years, range of 0 years to 8 years). All surveys were completed independently. VUSS Q1 and Q2, indicating daytime frequency and nocturia, had the best inherent recognition of concept with 97% correct interpretation. QoL had the poorest inherent recognition of concept with 72% correct interpretation. VUSS Q5, indicating dysuria, was thought by the participants to be the clearest. VUSS and UDI-6 totals had 0.878 correlation, while VUSS AUA-SI had 0.72 correlation.

Conclusions

VUSS content correlated well with UDI-6 total scores. Comprehension would benefit from increasing contrast details in pictograms. Further development can add to the ability to measure womens LUTS on a global scale to reduce language and literacy barriers to urologic history taking. Next steps will incorporate changes from this validation and testing in a low resource environment.

Funding

none