Patient-reported outcome measures for diabetes self-care: A systematic review of measurement properties

Abstract

Objectives: The aims of the present systematic review were to identify currently available patient-reported outcome measures for diabetes self-care that have been psychometrically evaluated and to evaluate their measurement properties.

Design: A systematic literature review with a meta-analysis.

Data sources: A systematic literature search was conducted of the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL databases.

Review methods: The updated COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) was applied using the following steps to evaluate the measurement properties of the diabetes self-care measures: (1) evaluating the methodological quality, (2) evaluating either quantitatively summarized or quantitatively pooled data against criteria for good measurement properties, and (3) the evaluating the quality of evidence by applying the modified Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation approach.

Results: Among 8434 articles yielded by the database search, 27 full-text articles that reported 34 studies of 13 different patient-reported outcome measures were included in this systematic review. The Diabetes Self-Management Instrument demonstrated the best content validity, with sufficient moderate-quality evidence for relevance, comprehensiveness, and comprehensibility. The Diabetes Self-Management Instrument exhibited sufficient moderate-quality evidence for structural validity and internal consistency, and sufficient high-quality evidence for convergent validity of hypothesis testing and sufficient low-quality evidence for reliability. The eight-item Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities-Revised was the most frequently investigated and shortest instrument with sufficient high-quality evidence for structural validity and internal consistency. However, the sufficient but very-low-quality comprehensiveness and the inconsistent very-low-quality comprehensibility for content validity, and the insufficient low-quality evidence for reliability must be considered when selecting this instrument.

Conclusions: None of the identified diabetes self-care instruments appears to be universally superior to the others. The Diabetes Self-Management Instrument might be the best based on current evidence, but this requires further evaluation of the measurement of invariance across languages. The eight-item Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities-Revised is the shortest instrument, but current evidence with regards to its content validity and reliability needs to be considered before applying this instrument. Further studies are recommended to evaluate the reliability, measurement error, and responsiveness of the diabetes self-care measurements.