Quality of life assessment instruments in children and adolescents with neuromuscular diseases: a systematic scoping review

Objective(1) To identify instruments used to assess quality of life (QoL) in children and adolescents with neuromuscular diseases; (2) To identify the psychometric properties contained in these instruments.MethodsThis is a scoping review in which the electronic databases Embase, Scielo, Scopus, Pubmed and Lilacs were used as well as grey literature. The following terms were used in the search for articles published in the last 10 years: children, adolescents, neuromuscular disease, and quality of life.ResultsIn total, 15 articles were included and evaluated, indicating 7 instruments used to assess QoL (PedsQL (TM) Inventory 3.0 Neuromuscular Module, the PedsQL (TM) 4.0, the PedsQL DMD Module, the PedsQL (TM) MFS, the SOLE, the KIDSCREEN and the LSI-A). The number of items ranged from 17 to 45. In addition, 6 instruments showed psychometric properties, but only 2 showed good and high quality, either in internal reliability or reproducibility.ConclusionOur results were able to map the main QoL assessment instruments of children and adolescents with neuromuscular disease and the most cited instrument was the PedsQL (TM) Inventory 3.0 Neuromuscular Module. Larger studies that assess psychometric properties and that are validated for most diseases are needed.