Validation of the Thai Version of the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scaled - Short Form Among Cholangiocarcinoma Patients

BACKGROUND: The Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale-Short Form (MSAS-SF), a standard instrument for assessing cancer patients’ symptoms, has been validated in numerous languages. However, it has not been validated in Thai. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to translate the MSAS-SF into Thai and determine its psychometric properties in Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) patients. METHODS: The MSAS-SF was translated into Thai, and 231 CCA patients completed the questionnaires, which included baseline characteristics, T-MSAS-SF, Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Hepatobiliary (FACT-Hep), and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to assess reliability for internal consistency. For convergent validity, Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to calculate the relationship between the T-MSAS-SF and the T-CaSUN, HADS, and FACT-Hep subscales. RESULTS: Subscale and total T-MSAS-SF internal consistency reliability was moderately high, with Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from 0.76 to 0.87. For convergent validity, the majority of T-MSAS-SF scores had moderate to low inverse correlation with FACT-Hep, HADS T-CaSUN subscales with the correlation coefficients-0.10 to -0.68 (p<0.05), reflecting that they were measuring a similar construct. CONCLUSION: Our findings showed that the T-MSAS-SF has acceptable validity and reliability to assess the psychometric properties of early to advance stage CCA patients during treatment and early post-treatment stage.