QUALITY-OF-LIFE AND MIGRAINE - VALIDATION OF QVM QUESTIONNAIRE

The feasibiiity, the validity and reliability of the questionnaire << Qualite de Vie et Migraine >> (QVM) were assessed during a study performed on 107 patients recruited either in neurological departments in hospitals (N = 58) or by G.P. (N = 49). The study was designed as a Test-Retest, the selfquestionnaire being filled twice at an interval of one week. The filling-in time was an average 7 min in hospital and 11 min for G. P.'s patients. The missing values were quite rare, between 1 % and 2 %. The items were assessed << very interesting >> or << interesting >> by 94 % of the patients, and << easy >> or << fairly easy to understand >> by 96 %. The principal component analysis performed on the whole sample allowed the extraction of 4 meaningful factors which were in agreement with the pre-defined structure of the questionnaire QVM. The lst axis was a factor of psychological repercussion, the 2nd axis was a factor of functional and somatic repercussion, the 3rd axis was a factor of social repercussion and the 4th one was a factor of disturbance generated by the treatment. The QVM questionnaire allowed the calculation of a global index of quality of life and indexes according to the multifactorial structure. The global index was significantly higher for the most severe patients recruited in hospital, which means that the repercussion of migraine on quality of life was greater than for G.P.'s patients. The reliability of the different indexes assessed by the correlation coefficient between the Test-Retest measures was good (r greater-than-or-equal-to 0.70-0.80 according to the indexes studied). The QVM questionnaire is an easy to use tool, validated and reliable for measuring quality of life in migrainers. The measures obtained are sensitive to the severity of migraine. To confirm the utility of the QVM in the clinical research field, its responsiveness to evolution under treatment has to be assessed in a clinical trial.