Monitoring the functional health status of stroke patients: the value of the Stroke-Adapted Sickness Impact Profile-30

Purpose: To further validate the Stroke-Adapted Sickness Impact Profile-30 (SA-SIP30) and to determine its responsiveness in a stroke rehabilitation population.

Method: Data of 122 communicative stroke patients ( mean age 57 years), selected for an inpatient rehabilitation programme, were available. All had suffered different types of stroke. Six months and one year post-stroke, the patients completed the SIP68 plus nine stroke-specific questions from the SIP136, enabling us to derive the SA-SIP30 from the questionnaire. We determined internal consistency, construct and clinical validity and responsiveness of the SA-SIP30. Total, physical and psychosocial dimension scores were calculated.

Results: Internal consistency was moderate to good (alpha>0.68) and correlation between the SIP68 and the SA-SIP30 was high (r>0.85), indicating good construct validity for total score and both dimension scores. Clinical validity assessment showed that total and psychosocial dimensions scores were significantly higher for patients with a cortical infarction compared to respectively subarachnoid haemorrhage and subcortical infarction ( p

Conclusions: The SA-SIP30 proved valid and responsive in our stroke rehabilitation population. The major advantages of the SA-SIP30 are the lesser number of items and, therefore, the shorter completion time and the fact that it is a stroke-specific scale to determine health-related functional status.