Reliability and Validity of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures for Ankle Instability in Hebrew

BACKGROUND: The International Ankle Consortium has recommended several instruments for assessing and diagnosing chronic ankle instability. These include the Ankle Instability Instrument (AII), Cumberland Ankle Instability Tool (CAIT), Identification of Functional Ankle Instability (IdFAI), and Foot and Ankle Ability Measure (FAAM). This study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and assess the reliability, validity, discriminative power, and classification agreement of the Hebrew online versions of the AII, CAIT, IdFAI, and FAAM. MATERIAL/METHODS: After translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the questionnaires, we recruited 87 participants with self-reported ankle disorders to evaluate the psychometric properties of the questionnaires. To evaluate each questionnaire’s discriminative power, we recruited 75 healthy participants. Reliability was assessed by calculating internal consistency (Cronbach’s alphas) and test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients. Convergent and divergent validity were assessed by Spearman’s correlation between each instrument and the Short-Form-12 (SF-12) score for physical and mental components, respectively. RESULTS: All instruments had acceptable internal consistency (α>0.7) and good test-retest reliability (ICC(2,1)>0.8), except for the IdFAI (ICC(2,1)=0.73). All instruments had moderate convergent validity (ρ>0.4 with SF-12 physical component) except for AII (ρ=0.36). No instrument was correlated with the SF-12 mental component score (good divergent validity, ρ<0.3). All instruments had excellent discriminative power (area under the receiver operator characteristic curve >0.9). Strong correlations were found between all instruments. CONCLUSIONS: The Hebrew online versions of the AII, CAIT, IdFAI, and FAAM are valid, consistent, and reliable and may be used in research or clinical settings.