Validation of a Modified German Version of the Brief Pain Inventory for Use in Nursing Home Residents with Chronic Pain.

UNLABELLED: The Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) has been psychometrically evaluated worldwide in adult patients with cancer-related and chronic pain in several languages, but never in nursing home residents with chronic pain. To address this gap, we evaluated the validity of a modified version of the BPI, the BPI for nursing home residents (BPI-NHR) in individuals who resided in German nursing homes. One analytic sample included 137 nursing home residents (mean age, 83.3 years; SD, 8.0 years) without any missing values. An extended sample also included individuals with previous missing values that were substituted with the personal mean (n = 163; mean age, 83.3 years; SD, 8.3 years). Principal axis factoring with oblimin rotation was used to compute the final 2-factor solution for the substituted sample. These factors explained 71.7% of the variance. Internal consistency was calculated using Cronbach α, and showed excellent results. Concurrent validity was tested using nonparametric correlation analyses of the BPI-NHR with the pain medication scale. The present findings support the reliability and validity of the BPI-NHR for very old nursing home residents. Further evaluation of this measure is needed to examine face validity and the effect of multimorbidity on pain interference with function.

PERSPECTIVE: In this article we present psychometric properties of the BPI originally developed to assess cancer pain, extended to measure chronic nonmalignant pain in younger and middle-aged patients, and now further developed to measure pain intensity and interference with function among very old nursing home residents. Thus, the BPI-NHR might assist clinicians and researchers interested in assessment of pain intensity and interference in elderly individuals who reside in nursing homes.