How Valid and Reliable Is the International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative (IDDSI) When Translated into...

Area of Science:

• Clinical Nutrition
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Health Services Research

Background:

• Swallowing difficulties (dysphagia) affect millions globally, necessitating standardized dietary modifications.
• The International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative (IDDSI) is crucial for dysphagia management but requires validation in different languages.
• The reliability and validity of translated IDDSI frameworks are essential for consistent clinical application.

Purpose of the Study:

• To translate the IDDSI framework into Swedish.
• To assess the validity and reliability of the Swedish translation of IDDSI.
• To ensure the translated IDDSI is understandable and applicable in a Swedish clinical context.

Main Methods:

• A 12-step translation process based on WHO recommendations was employed.
• Content Validity Index (CVI) was used to assess validity with expert panels (Dietitians, SLPs).
• Inter-rater reliability was determined using Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) with SLP assessments.

Main Results:

• Significant improvements in CVI for linguistic correlation (0.74-0.98) and understandability/applicability (0.79-0.93) were observed.
• Excellent validity (Item-CVI > 0.78, Scale-CVI/Average > 0.8) was confirmed.
• Very high inter-rater reliability (ICC > 0.9) was demonstrated for the translated IDDSI.

Conclusions:

• The multi-step translation process resulted in a valid and reliable Swedish version of IDDSI.
• This validated Swedish IDDSI framework supports safe and effective dysphagia management.
• The study contributes evidence for the global applicability of the IDDSI framework.