Medi？？o da qualidade de vida de insuficientes renais crónicos: cria？？o da vers？o portuguesa do KDQOL-SF

this paper aims at presenting the results from the translation, cultural adaptation and validation processes of the instrument kdqol-sf version 1.3 designed to measure the quality of life of chronic renal patients. this questionnaire is formed by questions aggregated into eleven specific esrd dimensions for renal patients in end-of-life phase, and eight health status generic sf dimensions. the questionnaire was translated by two independent translators from english into portuguese. then, an intermediate meeting produced a consensus translation from which a back-translation was performed. in another meeting, this back-translated version was compared to the original version, and an intermediate version was finished. next, two panels were formed, one composed by a physician and the other by five renal patients under haemodialysis who accepted to be part of a cognitive debriefing. the questionnaire was well accepted and was considered clear and easily understood by the patients. to test the reliability of the portuguese version of the kdqol-sf, we applied both concepts of intertemporal stability and internal consistency. in a 26 renal patients sample under dialitic treatment, the correlation scores between two consecutive measurements were high and positive, ranging from 0.71 for cognitive function to 0.98 for social support. internal consistency or content homogeneity was tested by chronach？s a with results higher than 0.70, except professional activity (0.69), burden of renal disease (0.65) and quality of social interaction (0.36). content validity was guaranteed by the results obtained on both panels and the construct validity was tested by the logical relations between variables and by the correlations between dimensions. we also evidenced a linear positive association among all esrd dimensions and sf dimensions, which assures us the criterion validity. the study of the psychometric characteristics of the kdqol-sf allows its use with the portuguese population on bot