Validity of the French Version of the Child's Chronic Rhinosinusitis Questionnaire

Chronic rhinosinusitis is a common pathology that entrains significant medical consumption. The prevalence of chronic rhinosinusitis in children is estimated to be 7.6%. Cardinal symptoms include nasal congestion, purulent rhinorrhea, facial pain, and persistent daytime cough. All these nasal symptoms often have an impact on the quality of life. The main objective of medical treatment is to improve this quality of life.

The treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis is mainly medical and includes nose washes with physiological serum, topical or general corticosteroid treatment or antibiotics. Surgical treatments such as adenoidectomy or endonasal functional surgery are reserved for medical treatment failures. According to a European consensus paper of 2012, the surgical strategy of the chronic rhinosinusitis of the child must start with a adenoidectomy with physiological serum washes, and then secondarily a endonasal functional surgery.

The ability of quality of life questionnaires to measure subjective symptoms over a certain length of time can help in the medical decision by determining the benefit of taking care. A single quality questionnaire evaluating the symptoms of chronic rhinosinusitis in children currently exists. It has been validated in English for children aged 2 to 12. It comprises five areas of quality of life, each rated by a score ranging from 1 to 7 : sinus infection, nasal obstruction, allergic symptoms, emotional distress and activity limitation, coupled with an overall assessment of quality of life with an analogue visual scale (score from 1 to 10). This SN-5 (sinus and nasal quality of life survey) score showed excellent statistics of reproducibility, internal validity and ease of response. It is currently used in several international publications evaluating chronic sinus pathology in children.

The objective of the study is to validate the translation of the SN-5 questionnaire in French.