The Romanian Version of Health-Related Quality of Life Questionnaire 12 for Chronic Otitis Media. The Socio-Economic Status Impact Significance

Objective: Our primary objective was to translate and validate Chronic Otitis Media (COM) Questionnaire-12 (COMQ-12) in Romanian. The secondary objective was to investigate the effect of the socioeconomic status on the preoperative COMQ-12 scores in individuals with a similar stage of disease. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. Patients diagnosed with different stages of (COM) with cholesteatoma, scheduled for the first surgery, filled in the Romanian translated version of the COMQ-12. The patients were divided according to the stage of the disease and the environment of origin: rural versus urban areas. Results: The internal consistency of the Romanian COMQ-12 proved excellent, with a Cronbach’s alpha equal to 0.959. The correlation of the 24 randomly split-half reliability analysis varied from 0.904 to 0.917, with a mean of 0.908. Significantly higher COMQ-12 scores are obtained by patients from urban (mean = 42.14, SD =9.04) as compared to those from rural (mean = 30.44, SD = 5.88) only for those with stage III disease (P-value=0.0292). Conclusions: Romanian version of COMQ-12 proved to be a valid instrument that can be use in clinical practice to provide suitable information in COM patients, which contributes to the development of an international common otology dataset. Patients from rural areas tend to disregard their symptoms, being more predisposed to potential complications related to COM rather than urban patients at the same stage of the disease.