Application of the Vestibular Disorders Activities of Daily Living Scale in Assessment of Functional Limitation in Patients with Vestibular Disorders

One the of most important tasks of the human body postural control system is that of balancing the body, and the vestibular system is one of the most important tools to control posture. Any impairment in the vestibular system will create symptoms such as vertigo, dizziness, and disequilibrium. These symptoms and the underlying impairments can lead to functional limitations or deficits in performing routine daily life tasks. As a result, it will increase dependency on others. Therefore, it is necessary to know the individuals who are susceptible to be influenced by vestibular disorders for therapy planning. It should be noted that no vestibular and functional test can provide this information. There are several other standard scales to assess functional limitation in vestibular disorders, but these questionnaires differ from each other in their purposes as well as their content. Vestibular disorders Activities of Daily living scale is one of the several international self-assessment scales that is useful for determining the level of functional limitation or disability in patients with vestibular disorders, and guide therapy planning and vestibular rehabilitation in particular.
In order to review the VADL to assess functional limitation in patients with vestibular disorders, all articles in this field, published from 1983 to 2015, were reviewed in ScienceDirect, EBSCO, PubMed, PMC, Google Scholar, Elsevier, Ovid, Proquest, Scopus, and Springer databases.
More than 300 articles on topics related to functional assessment in vestibular disorders, activities of daily living, quality of life, and vestibular disorders questionnaires were available in these databases. Finally, we used 32 full papers and 6 research abstracts.
. Given that the psychometric evaluation of the Persian version of VADL has not been conducted in Iran, it seems necessary to translate the questionnaire into Persian and carry out cross-cultural adaptation as well as verification of the psychometric properties of VADL.