Development and Validation of the Vision-Related Dizziness Questionnaire

To develop and validate the first patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) to quantify vision-related dizziness. Dizziness is a common, multifactorial syndrome that causes reductions in quality of life and is a major risk factor for falls, but the role of vision is not well understood.

Potential domains and items were identified by literature review and discussions with experts and patients to form a pilot PROM, which was completed by 335 patients with dizziness. Rasch analysis was used to determine the items with good psychometric properties to include in a final PROM, to check undimensionality, differential item functioning, and to convert ordinal questionnaire data into continuous interval data. Validation of the final 25-item instrument was determined by its convergent validity, patient, and item-separation reliability and unidimensionality using data from 223 patients plus test-retest repeatability from 79 patients.

120 items were originally identified, then subsequently reduced to 46 to form a pilot PROM. Rasch analysis was used to reduce the number of items to 25 to produce the vision-related dizziness or VRD-25. Two subscales of VRD-12-frequency and VRD-13-severity were shown to be unidimensional, with good psychometric properties. Convergent validity was shown by moderately good correlations with the Dizziness Handicap Inventory (r = 0.75) and good test-retest repeatability with intra-class correlation coefficients of 0.88.

VRD-25 is the only PROM developed to date to assess vision-related dizziness. It has been developed using Rasch analysis and provides a PROM for this under-researched area and for clinical trials of interventions to reduce vision-related dizziness.