Development, Validation and Pilot testing of a Multidimensional Rehabilitation Protocol for Post-menopausal women

ABSTRACT Background: Menopause is a normal aging phenomenon in women which marks the end of the reproductive phase. The overall prevalence of menopausal symptoms in all domains was reported as 87.7% which includes hot flushes, cognition, autonomic nervous disorders, sleep disturbances, mood changes, anxiety, depressive symptoms, urogenital symptoms, fatigue, limb pain and paraesthesia, and joint pain, etc. Estrogen is believed to be potent regulators of mind and body. Low levels of estrogen during menopause is responsible for the impairments which leads to decrease in overall quality of life of a post-menopausal women. Purpose: The study aimed to develop, validate and pilot testing a multidimensional rehabilitation protocol for post-menopausal women. Methods: This study comprises two phases. First phase is concerned with the protocol development and validation process. This phase includes Delphi method which will evaluate the content validity of the protocol. Second phase consists of pilot testing of the protocol for post-menopausal women. Data Analysis: The collected data will be analyzed by using SPSS 16.0 version. Normality will be assessed by Kolmogrov smirnov test. If the data is found to be normally distributed, it will be presented as mean+SD and pearson correlation test will be used to analyse. If the data is found to be not normally distributed, it will be presented as Median (Interquartile Range) and Spearman’s correlation test will be used to analyse it. Result: The protocol has been validated by a group of multidisciplinary experts. 7 experts responded and evaluated each item of the protocol and suggested modifications. The content Validity of each item was found to be between 0.86 and 1 whereas the S-CVI by average method was found to be 0.93 which was above the satisfactory level as suggested by Lynn i.e. above 0.83. Keywords: menopause, hot flushes, cognition, quality of life