Deans' stroke musings: A new scale for measuring quality of life in acquired brain injury

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, November 23, 2018

A new scale for measuring quality of life in acquired brain injury

I can't find the CAVIDACE scale to see what my quality of life is.

A new scale for measuring quality of life in acquired brain injury

Fernández M^1,², Gómez LE^3,⁴, Arias VB^5,⁴, Aguayo V^5,⁴, Amor AM^5,⁴, Andelic N^6,⁷, Verdugo MA^5,⁴.

Author information

Abstract

PURPOSE:

A common and frequent consequence of an acquired brain injury (ABI) is the diminished quality of life (QoL) of affected people. Because the majority of existing QoL instruments assess health-related domains, new instruments that allow for the evaluation of the QoL from an integral perspective that considers the context and personal factors of the individual are warranted. Hence, the purpose of this study is to develop and validate an instrument with these characteristics.

METHODS:

The CAVIDACE scale is a new 64-item specific instrument to assess QoL in people with ABI based on a third-person perspective. The validation sample comprises 421 adults with ABI, with ages ranging from 17 to 90 years (M = 53.12; SD = 14.87). The scale was completed by 97 professionals and 58 family members. Validity evidence based on the internal structure of the scale was provided through confirmatory factor analyses. Reliability was analyzed in terms of internal consistency and inter-rater reliability.

RESULTS:

The results supported the internal structure of the scale, based on the theoretical and assessment framework in which QoL is composed of eight intercorrelated first-order domains (CFI = 0.890, RMSEA = 0.065, SRMR = 0.071). The internal consistency was good or excellent for the eight domains (ordinal alpha ranging from 0.77 to 0.93). The inter-rater reliability was very high (0.97).

CONCLUSIONS:

The CAVIDACE scale is found to be a specific instrument with excellent psychometric properties that is helpful for the assessment of QoL in people with ABI, both in clinical practice and for research purposes.