Background: Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease with adverse physical and psychosocial impacts. The development of an HS quality-of-life measure, HS-QoL, has been recently described.
Objective: This study was designed to validate the HS-QoL.
Method: Fifty-five patients with HS from 4 dermatology clinics completed the 30-minute online survey. Item reduction, reliability (internal consistency), and correlation analysis (to assess convergent validity) were conducted.
Results: The HS-QoL was reduced from 53 items to 44 items, resulting in a 7-subscale questionnaire. All subscales demonstrated excellent internal consistency, except for the support subscale, which had adequate internal consistency. All 7 HS-QoL subscales were related to other measures of QoL, life satisfaction, and mental health, which demonstrates convergent validity.
Conclusion: The 44-item HS-QoL demonstrated strong preliminary evidence of reliability (internal consistency) and convergent validity.
Keywords: HS-QoL; development; hidradenitis suppurativa; measure; patient-reported outcomes; psychometric validation; quality of life.