Exploration of the methods of establishing the minimum clinical important difference based on anchor and its application in the quality of life measurement scale QLICP-ES (V2.0) for esophageal cancer

BACKGROUND: The development of the minimum clinical important difference (MCID) can make it easier for researchers or doctors to judge the significance of research results and the effect of intervention measures, and improve the evaluation system of efficacy. This paper is aimed to calculate the MCID based on anchor and to develop MCID for esophageal cancer scale (QLICP-ES). METHODS: The item Q29 (How do you evaluate your overall health in the past week with 7 grades answers from 1 very poor to 7 excellent)of EORTC QLQ-C30 was used as the subjective anchor to calculate the score difference between each domain at discharge and admission. MCID was established according to two standards, "one grade difference"(A) and "at least one grade difference"(B), and developed by three methods: anchor-based method, ROC curve method and multiple linear regression models. In terms of anchor-based method, the mean of the absolute value of the difference before and after treatments is MCID. The point with the best sensitivity and specificity-Yorden index at the ROC curve is MCID for ROC curve method. In contrast, the predicted mean value based on a multiple linear regression model and the parameters of each factor is MCID. RESULTS: Most of the correlation coefficients of Q29 and various domains of the QLICP-ES were higher than 0.30. The rank of MCID values determined by different methods and standards were as follows: standard B > standard A, anchor-based method > ROC curve method > multiple linear regression models. The recommended MCID values of physical domain, psychological domain, social domain, common symptom and side-effects domain, the specific domain and the overall of the QLICP-ES were 7.8, 9.7, 4.7, 3.6, 4.3, 2.3 and 2.9, respectively. CONCLUSION: Different methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and also different definitions and standards can be adopted according to research purposes and methods. A lot of different MCID values were presented in this paper so that it can be easy and convenient to select by users.