Activities of daily living in Greek cancer patients treated in a palliative care unit.

Goals Of Work: To assess the psychometric properties of the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scale on a Greek sample of advanced cancer patients.

Patients And Methods: The scale was translated with the forward-backward procedure to Greek. The ADL scale was administered to 136 advanced cancer patients. It was administered twice, with a 3-day interval, to 40 (of the 136) eligible patients with advanced cancer to assess the scale's stability. For the assessment of treatment effect, the index was administered to 90 (of the 136) patients 15 days later. Together with the ADL scale, the patients also completed the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out using the AMOS 7.0 analysis. The reliability was assessed by the internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha co-efficients), and test/retest (Spearman's r value) of the instrument. Validity was assessed with construct validity using the IADL scale, treatment-effect, known groups, and convergent validity.

Main Results: The homogeneity of the scale proved to be satisfactory (cronbach alpha = 0.88). Overall test-retest reliability was satisfactory. Construct validity has shown satisfactory correlations with IADL p < 0.0005. Convergent validity and treatment effect were satisfactory at p < 0.0005 and p < 0.05, respectively. Known groups validity detected differences according to patient's performance status (p < 0.0005).

Conclusions: The results suggest that the Greek version of ADL administered in cancer patients treated in a palliative care unit is a reliable and valid clinical instrument.