[Translation into Spanish and a preliminary analysis of the psychometric properties of the Newcastle Stroke-Specific Quality of Life Measure (NEWSQOL) questionnaire for rating the quality of life among post-stroke patients].

INTRODUCTION: The Newcastle Stroke-Specific Quality of Life Measure (NEWSQOL) is one of the few specific questionnaires for evaluating the quality of life among patients who have suffered an ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke.

AIMS: To translate and adapt this questionnaire into Spanish and to evaluate its reliability and acceptability.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: The original version of the NEWSQOL questionnaire was translated into Spanish. The translation was agreed upon by a team of experts, and was then back-translated into English and sent to the author, who gave her approval of the rendering. This version was later administered to a group of patients in order to evaluate its reliability, acceptability, floor effect and ceiling effect.

RESULTS: The process of linguistic adaptation allowed semantic, conceptual and content equivalence to be achieved in the Spanish version of the NEWSQOL. The results obtained in the preliminary analysis show excellent acceptability, an internal consistency index of 0.9 for the whole questionnaire and a good or excellent test-retest agreement for all the domains. No ceiling effect was detected, but a floor effect was observed in the case of the vision and cognition domains.

CONCLUSION: The Spanish version of the NEWSQOL questionnaire is reliable for evaluating the quality of life in post-stroke patients, as well as being well accepted. The questionnaire must be used in more broader samples in order to evaluate its validity and sensitivity.