Background: Aim of the study was to translate into Polish, adapt culturally and perform pilot testing of Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) and QuickDASH questionnaires.
Material and methods: We followed recommendations and performed a double forward-backward translation. An Expert Committee consisting of physicians, a sworn translator, English native speakers, a psychologist and a linguist reviewed and consolidated all the translations. The Committee's decisions aimed to achieve semantic, idiomatic, experiential and conceptual equivalence with the original version. Thirty patients (20 men), medium age 41.1 years (range 13-79), took part in pilot testing. The study population was heterogeneous in terms of side affected, diagnosis and treatment.
Results: Expert Committee members reached consensus on 65 discrepancies. In pilot testing, patients had no complaints about understanding or difficulty of the adapted version of the questionnaire. Still, there were some items with missing answers (most often - sexual activity; 60%). Understanding of randomly chosen questions and answers was appropriate. Five patients (16.7%) had more than 10 percent of the items left blank. Substantial ceiling and floor effects were identified for one and two items, respectively.
Conclusions: 1. The translation and cultural adaptation led to the development of the official Polish versions of the DASH and QuickDASH questionnaires. 2. Although we have provided some evidence of content validity, additional testing for the retention of psychometric properties of the translated questionnaire is recommended.