Translation and Validation of the PASS Test for Gastro-esophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) Patients With Partial Response to PPI in Chinese Population: PASS-HK

Gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a common condition defined as symptoms or mucosal damage produced by the abnormal reflux of gastric contents into the esophagus. Symptoms highly specific for GERD are heartburn, regurgitation, or both, which often occur after meals. The prevalence of GERD is around 20% for weekly reflux symptoms in the Western population, while 9.3% in Chinese population. However, approximately 20-30% of patients with GERD experience only a partial response of their heartburn of regurgitation symptoms to PPI therapy.

There is lack of a validated Chines version of PASS questionnaire for the GERD patients with partial response to PPI.

Before a treatment response assessment tool can be used clinically, various questions on reliability and validity of the instrument need to be addressed. The aims of this study are (1) to translate the PASS test from English to traditional Chinese, named PASS-HK, and (2) to assess the psychometric properties of the PASS-HK, before clinical application.

Linguistic translation of the PASS questionnaire from English to Chinese version will follow a forward-backward procedure.

After finalization of Chinese version of the PASS (PASS-HK), the reliability of PASS-HK will be evaluated for internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha. The intraclass correlation coefficient was calculated within 14 days for two surveys in order to evaluate the reproducibility of the results under constant conditions. Pearson product moment correlation coefficient will be used to evaluate whether PASS-HK can measure what it claims to measure by comparing with SF-12v2, GERD QOL and GREDSQ scores.