4140 Reliability and Validity of a Korean Version of the Cough Symptom Score

Saturday, 17 October 2015
Hall D1 Foyer (Floor 3) (Coex Convention Center)

Jeana Hong, MD , Department of Pediatrics, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon, South Korea

Kinam Nam , Kangwon National University Hospital, Chuncheon, South Korea

Ji-Yong Moon, MD , Department of Internal Medicine, Hanyang University College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea

Sae-Hoon Kim, MD , Internal Medicine, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Seongnam, South Korea

Woo-Jung Song, MD , Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, South Korea

Byung-Jae Lee, MD, PhD , Department of Medicine, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea

Jae-Woo Kwon, MD , Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Department of Internal Medicine, Kangwon National University College of Medicine, Chuncheon, South Korea

Jae-Woo Kwon, MD , Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Department of Internal Medicine, Kangwon National University College of Medicine, Chuncheon, South Korea

Cough symptom score is a simple and useful tool to measure severity of chronic cough. We developed a Korean version of the cough symptom score and tested its scaling and clinical properties.

Cough symptom score was adapted for Korean conditions following a forward-backward translation procedure. All patients referred to chronic cough clinics of 5 university hospitals between May 2011 and October 2013 completed two questionnaires, the LCQ and the Short-Form 36 (SF-36) upon presentation and completed Leicester Cough Questionnaire (LCQ) and the Global Rating of Change upon follow-up visits with two or four weeks intervals. Concurrent validation, internal consistency, repeatability and responsiveness were determined.

For the concurrent validation, the correlation coefficients (n = 202 patients) between the cough symptom score and LCQ varied between -0.66 and -0.60 and between cough symptom score and VAS varied between -0.51 and -0.58. The internal consistency of the cough symptom score (n = 207) evaluated as correlation between scores of night and day symptoms was 0.24 (p=0.0006). The repeatability of the cough symptom score in patients with no change in cough (n = 23) was high with intra-class correlation coefficients varying between 0.66 and 0.81. Patients who reported an improvement in cough (n = 30) on follow-up visits demonstrated significant improvement on each of the domains of the cough symptom score.

The Korean version of cough symptom score is a valid and reliable method to measure severity of chronic cough.