Recurrent syncope as a chronic disease: preliminary validation of a disease-specific measure of functional impairment

A disease-specific measure of functional health in syncope would provide an important outcome measure for use either in clinical trials or in the clinical management of patients with recurrent syncope.

In a previous study the authors used formal functional status measures to determine physical and psychosocial impairment in recurrent syncope. This study provides a preliminary assessment of a disease-specific measure of function. The measure was pilot tested on 84 subjects, and validated in a separate cohort of 49 patients. The measure consists of 1) an 11-question matrix of yes/no questions, assessing the ways that syncope interferes with a patient's life (the result is expressed as a proportion of the total number of ways that syncope might interfere and is called the Impairment Score), and 2) three Likert-scale questions that assess the patient's fear and worry about syncope. Correlations were obtained between scores on the disease-specific measure and other measures of functional health.

Among the 49 patients in the test cohort, final scores on the disease-specific measure correlated with both physical and psychosocial dimension scores on a measure of functional status, the Sickness Impact Profile (r = 0.35-0.36, p = 0.01), and with five of ten subscale scores on a measure of psychological distress, the Symptom Checklist 90-R (r = 0.30-0.43, p = 0.004-0.02).

This new disease-specific quality-of-life measure in syncope measures both physical and psychosocial components of impairment and could be a valuable adjunct in measuring outcomes in syncope patients.