A Swedish version of the Women's Health Questionnaire. A measure of postmenopausal complaints

Abstract

We wanted to provide details on the psychometric documentation of the Swedish version of the Women's Health Questionnaire (WHQ), a patient based measure of postmenopausal complaints. The results of two clinical trials in Sweden in which the WHQ had been used as one out of several measurement tools were used to document the reliability, the validity and the responsiveness to change of the WHQ. More than 350 women suffering from postmenopausal complaints were included in the two trials. A factor analysis, using the baseline values of all women in each study, showed that the Swedish version of the WHQ was very close to the English original. The internal consistency reliability was excellent. The clinical validity was confirmed by a significant correlation between change in E 2 levels and change in the WHQ during estrogen therapy. A high construct validity was established by the agreement between the WHQ and other quality of life scales. For use in clinical trials the WHQ was sensitive to treatment-induced changes, and added important information to the clinical effect variables.