Cultural Adaptation, Validity, and Reliability of the Persian Version of Wexner Constipation Scoring System

Chronic functional constipation is a prevalent and symptom-based disorder of the gastrointestinal tract. Constipation takes several different forms among patients. The Wexner Constipation Scoring System (WCSS) was developed to present a uniform tool for the assessment of chronic functional constipation. The purpose of this study was to provide the Persian version of WCSS and assess its validity and reliability.

WCSS was translated into Farsi. After being linguistically validated, the Persian version of the WCSS was administered to a sample of 76 patients with chronic functional constipation. Reliability tests were used to evaluate the internal consistency (the Cronbach alpha) and reproducibility (Intraclass Coefficient Correlation [ICC]) of the tool. The validation studies were conducted to assess the convergent validity (Correlated with the Patient Assessment of Constipation Symptom [PAC-SYM]) and Concurrent Validity (Correlated with Patient Assessment of Constipation Quality of Life [PAC-QOL]) of the tool, too.

The Cronbach alpha for total scores was 0.66 and the ICC was 0.85 (0.77-0.90, 95% CI). The total score of WCSS was significantly correlated with the total scores of PAC-SYM (r=0.67) and PAC-QOL (r=0.61). 

The linguistic and psychometric evaluation demonstrated good validity and reproducibility of the Persian version of WCSS.