Development and Validation of a Short Version of the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire

Background There is a growing demand to collect patients' experiences of their health status (their symptoms, function, and quality of life) in clinical trials, quality assessment initiatives, and in routine clinical care. In heart failure, the 23-item, disease-specific Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) has been shown to be valid, reliable, sensitive to clinical change, and prognostic of both clinical events and costs. However, its use has been limited, in part, by its length. We sought to develop a shortened version of the instrument that maintains the psychometric properties of the full KCCQ. Methods and Results Using data from 3 clinical studies incorporating 4168 patients, we derived and validated a 12-item KCCQ, the KCCQ-12, to capture symptom frequency, physical and social limitations, and quality of life impairment as a result of heart failure, as well as an overall summary score. The KCCQ-12 scores had high correlations with the original scales (>0.93 for all scales in all clinical settings), high test-retest reliability (>0.76 for all domains), high responsiveness (16-31 point improvements after discharge from hospitalization; standardized response mean =0.61-1.12), and comparable prognostic significance and interpretation of clinically important differences as compared with the full KCCQ. Conclusions The KCCQ-12 is a shorter version of the original 23-item instrument that should be more feasible to implement while preserving the psychometric properties of the full instrument.