Development and psychometric testing of a breast cancer patient-profiling questionnaire

The advent of "personalized medicine" has been driven by technological advances in genomics. Concentration at the subcellular level of a patient's cancer cells has meant inevitably that the "person" has been overlooked. For this reason, we think there is an urgent need to develop a truly personalized approach focusing on each patient as an individual, assessing his/her unique mental dimensions and tailoring interventions to his/her individual needs and preferences. The aim of this study was to develop and test the psychometric properties of the ALGA-Breast Cancer (ALGA-BC), a new multidimensional questionnaire that assesses the breast cancer patient's physical and mental characteristics in order to provide physicians, prior to the consultation, with a patient's profile that is supposed to facilitate subsequent communication, interaction, and information delivery between the doctor and the patient.

The specific validation processes used were: content and face validity, construct validity using factor analysis, reliability and internal consistency using test-retest reliability, and Cronbach's alpha correlation coefficient. The exploratory analysis included 100 primary breast cancer patients and 730 healthy subjects.

The exploratory factor analysis revealed eight key factors: global self-rated health, perceived physical health, anxiety, self-efficacy, cognitive closure, memory, body image, and sexual life. Test-retest reliability and internal consistency were good. Comparing patients with a sample of healthy subjects, we also observed a general ability of the ALGA-BC questionnaire to discriminate between the two.

The ALGA-BC questionnaire with 29 items is a valid instrument with which to obtain a patient's profile that is supposed to help physicians achieve meaningful personalized care which supplements biological and genetic analyses.