Discriminative Performance and Preliminary Psychometric Evaluation of the Study-Specific Composite Questionnaire...

Area of Science:

• Gynecology
• Urogynecology
• Women's Health

Background:

• Vaginal laxity (VL) is a common subjective complaint lacking standardized diagnostic tools.
• Accurate assessment is crucial for effective patient management and treatment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the discriminative performance and psychometric properties of a study-specific composite questionnaire for diagnosing vaginal laxity.
• To identify an optimal cutoff score for the French Vaginal Laxity Questionnaire (VLQ) to differentiate symptomatic from asymptomatic women.

Main Methods:

• A prospective study included 119 French-speaking women (29 with VL, 90 without).
• Participants completed a composite questionnaire including the VLQ and other pelvic floor-related items.
• Statistical analysis focused on identifying the best VLQ cutoff using the Youden index and assessing test-retest reliability.

Main Results:

• A VLQ score ≤2 demonstrated high discriminative power (86.2% sensitivity, 90.0% specificity, AUC 0.905).
• Symptomatic women reported lower VLQ scores and more associated symptoms.
• The questionnaire showed good to excellent temporal stability over 15 days.

Conclusions:

• The study-specific composite questionnaire is a reliable and effective tool for assessing symptomatic vaginal laxity.
• It offers strong discriminative performance and satisfactory temporal stability as a brief, patient-reported outcome measure.