Validation of the quality of life questionnaire of the European foundation for osteoporosis (QUALEFFO-31) in Chinese

QUALEFFO-31 is a recently developed disease-specific instrument derived from QUALEFFO-41 and intended to have improved efficacy and response rates. We aimed to validate QUALEFFO-31 in Chinese and examine the use of QUALEFFO-31 in clinical practice. This questionnaire was translated into Chinese and applied to 118 case–control pairs aged between 50 and 85 years with prevalent osteoporotic vertebral fractures to evaluate its validity, repeatability, and discriminatory ability. It was also used to evaluate the quality of life (QOL) of 69 case–control trios with prevalent clinical and morphometric fractures. The QOL of all subjects was concurrently assessed using SF-36 for comparison. QUALEFFO-31 had good internal consistency with adequate convergent and discriminatory validity. The median test–retest repeatability ranged from 0.65–0.85. In general, there were good correlations between QUALEFFO-31 and SF-36. ROC curve analysis revealed that QUALEFFO-31 had significant ability to discriminate between clinical fracture subjects versus morphometric fracture subjects and controls. QUALEFFO-31 also demonstrated higher discriminatory capacity for pain. Subjects with clinical vertebral fractures (CVFs) had a significant reduction in QOL compared with other subjects. The QUALEFFO-31 is a useful tool for assessing QOL in Chinese. It was well accepted and significantly predictive of subjects with CVFs.