Japanese SF-MPQ valid for neuropathic and non-neuropathic pain

By Lucy Piper, Senior medwireNews Reporter

Researchers have developed a Japanese translated version of the Short-Form McGill Pain Questionnaire (SF-MPQ)-2 that shows good reliability and validity for discriminating between chronic neuropathic and non-neuropathic pain.

The SF-MPQ-2 consists of 22 descriptors that respondents rate on a scale of 0–10, with 0 indicating no pain and 10 the worst pain possible. These are then divided into four subscales capturing continuous pain, intermittent pain, predominantly neuropathic pain and affective descriptors.

The Japanese translated version – SF-MPQ-2-J – showed good internal consistency when tested in 117 patients with different forms of chronic pain.

The internal consistency for the total score, determined using Cronbach’s α coefficient, was 0.907, and for the continuous, intermittent, neuropathic and affective descriptor subscales it was 0.893, 0.875, 0.917 and 0.857, respectively.

This level of internal consistency was “as a high as the values obtained for the original English version of the exam”, note researcher Youichi Saitoh (Osaka University, Japan) and co-workers.

The total and subscale scores also significantly correlated with those of the SF-MPQ-J, Long-Form-MPQ-J (LF-MPQ-J) and visual analogue scale. And confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit for each of the subscales, with a goodness of fit index value of 0.917.

The SF-MPQ-2-J also showed good validity when tested against other pain assessment tools (SF-MPQ-J, LF-MPQ-J, the SF-36 and the Pain Disability Assessment Scale) in 103 patients experiencing chronic neuropathic pain and 114 with non-neuropathic pain.

For the most part, assessment results did not differ significantly between patients with neuropathic and those with non-neuropathic pain. The exception was for the neuropathic subscale of the SF-MPQ-2-J, on which patients with neuropathic pain scored significantly higher than those with non-neuropathic pain, at an average of 13.5 versus 7.8.

The fact that the SF-MPQ-2-J was able to detect patients with neuropathic pain and simultaneously quantify the associated pain means that it has “the potential to be used as a general measure in medical research and in routine clinical practice”, the researchers write in Pain Medicine.

They conclude that the SF-MPQ-2-J is “a reliable, valid and sensitive pain questionnaire that includes a full range of clearly defined items applicable to evaluating both [neuropathic pain] and non-[neuropathic pain].”

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