Alopecia areata – Quality of Life Questionnaire – formation and validation of the Polish version

Introduction:
Alopecia areata (AA) is an autoimmune disorder causing non-scarring hair loss. AA impacts individuals’ quality of life (QoL), affecting emotional wellbeing, self-esteem, and social interactions, and is associated with mental health issues like depression and anxiety. There is a lack of adequate, validated, disease-specific questionnaires to evaluate the quality of life in Polish-speaking patients with AA.

Aim:
Formation and validation of the Polish version of the Alopecia Areata Quality of Life questionnaire (AA-QLI).

Material and methods:
The original English version of the questionnaire was translated into Polish using a forward and backward translation process according to international standards. The validation was conducted on 21 patients suffering from AA, who completed the questionnaire twice with a 5-day interval. To assess internal consistency of the questionnaire the Cronbach a coefficient was used. The reliability of the Polish version of the questionnaire was evaluated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC).

Results:
The Polish version of the AA-QLI questionnaire demonstrated good internal consistency with Cronbach a coefficient of 0.86 for the first completion of the questionnaire. The ICC of 0.93 indicated very good reproducibility of this questionnaire.

Conclusions:
The Polish version of the AA-QLI questionnaire showed high internal consistency and reliability, making it a suitable tool for assessing the health-related quality of life in Polish-speaking AA patients.