Psychometric validation of the Turkish version of the Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory.

Abstract

Objectives Certain symptoms of neuropathic pain and their combinations respond differently to various treatments. The Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory (NPSI) performs sensory phenotyping, providing a detailed assessment of neuropathic pain qualities, demonstrating responsiveness to changes in pain, and classifying patients for clinical trials in both central and peripheral conditions. This study aimed to perform a psychometric validation of the Turkish version of the NPSI (NPSI-T). Patients and Methods In this cross-sectional study, the NPSI-T, Douleur Neuropathique 4, and Numeric Rating Scale were administered twice to 275 patients with central and peripheral neuropathic pain (PNP) at 1-week intervals. All reliability and validity analyses, including factor analyses, Cronbach's alpha, Hotelling's T2, Tukey's test of nonadditivity, and item analysis, were performed using SPSS 27.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Software to compute descriptive statistics. Results The NPSI-T showed high reliability with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.89, an internal consistency Spearman-Brown coefficient of 0.779, and a significant 27% difference between upper and lower groups. The total explained variance was 61.58%, and five subdimensions were identified through exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that the structure, consisting of four subdimensions with 9 items, is valid, as indicated by excellent goodness-of-fit indices. Conclusion The results of this study indicate that the NPSI-T is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing Turkish patients with central and PNP syndromes.