Italian Translation and Cross-Cultural Adaptation of a Back Pain Screening Questionnaire (Start Back Screening Tool).

BACKGROUND

Low back pain is a heterogeneous condition, from which most patients recover after a few months. However, a considerable proportion of patients develop chronic pain despite different types of treatment. Primary care evidence-based guidelines for non-specific back pain highlight the importance of identifying indicators of poor prognosis in order for treatment to be appropriately targeted. The Start Back Screening Tool Questionnaire (SBST) is a prognostic tool developed and validated to identify subgroups of patients and guide the decision-making process for the initial primary care of the acute back pain.

AIMS: The aim of this project is the translation and the cross-cultural adaptation of an Italian SBST version. The development of a reliable and validated questionnaire would be useful for different health professionals in the management of low back pain.

METHODS

The translation and validation of this tool was divided in different steps, following the guidance of questionnaire translation: contact with the SBST developers, translation from English to Italian, synthesis, retranslation from Italian to English, expert committee review, test of the pre-final version on 30 individuals with LBP, and the final version being approved by the original Author.

RESULTS

For the linguistic translation it was necessary to make some semantic variations. The interviewed participants reported a good general understanding of the questions. However, 6 subjects (14%) wondered if two questions were related to back pain or general health. After discussion within the expert committee and with the SBST developer, the wording was modified to add a reference to back pain in these two questions. The Italian version of STST is now ready for validation.