Australian and New Zealand research has developed and validated a shorter version of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Disability Index (IBD-DI) for patients to self-report their experience of IBD-related disability.

The developers say the original 28-item IBD-DI was useful as a clinical interview tool but a self-report version would improve its utility especially as a patient-reported outcome (PRO) tool in clinical trials.

The validation population comprised 120 adults with IBD recruited from the Concord Hospital, Sydney and Christchurch Hospital.

The study first validated the 28-item IBD-DI as a self-report tool against its use in a clinical interview. It then reduced the 28 items to just eight questions that optimally predicted the clinician total score.

Questions about abdominal pain, stool consistency, blood in stool, participation in work and home activities, mood and family support made the cut.

“These 8-questions explain 77% of the total questionnaire variance. An item-reduced self-report English version of the IBD-DI is more usable because it takes less time for completion and may increase research ease and capacity,” the researchers said in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Other items regarding sleep, self-care, weight, diet and the impact of advice from health professionals were excluded because of poor validity or low correlation with the clinician total score.

The researchers concluded that the new measure of disability would now be more widely usable “due to its brevity and elimination of the need for a clinician to perform an interview”.

“Disability is an important PRO and this tool should be more widely used to explore treatments that improve activity participation and overall functioning in IBD patients,” they suggested.