Reliability and Validity of the Turkish Language Version of the International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire - Male Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms

PURPOSE: Patients receiving treatment for benign prostate hyperplasia may have persistent storage symptoms. There has been increasing debate on the precision and accuracy of the International Prostate Symptom Score questionnaires over other questionnaires in evaluating all the complaints of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). The aim of this study was to perform the validity and reliability analysis of the Turkish version of the Internatinal Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire-Male LUTS (ICIQ-MLUTS). METHODS: Linguistic validation was studied (i.e., translation and back translation). Intelligibility was completed between October 2013 and November 2013. Data was collected between November 2013 and March 2014. The stability and reliability of the form were measured with the Cronbach test. RESULTS: In total, 117 male patients were included in the study. At the first visit, the mean age of the patients was 59 years (range, 18–84 years). For reliability, the Cronbach alpha value was 0.798, demonstrating the internal consistency of the form (r>0.7). The internal consistency of each question was examined separately and found to be over 0.7. For the evaluation of test-retest reliability, the test was administered to 116 patients for a second time with an interval of 2–4 weeks. The first and second test scores for each question were found to be correlated (r=0.741). CONCLUSIONS: ICIQ-MLUTS is a new questionnaire, which can be used for evaluating male LUTS in Turkey. We believe that the Turkish version of the ICIQ-MLUTS is an important breakthrough in our country.