Translation and validation of the drooling impact scale questionnaire into Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract Introduction Inadequate drooling can cause serious clinical, functional and social problems. Validated questionnaires to evaluate drooling impact on quality of life are lacking in Brazilian Portuguese. Objectives To translate and validate the drooling impact scale to Brazilian Portuguese. Methods The drooling impact scale was translated to Brazilian Portuguese and back- translated to English to assess potential conceptual differences. Brazilian Portuguese version of drooling impact scale was applied to a 40 patients’ sample of sialorrhea presenting pediatric patients (up to 20 years of age). Chronbach’s alpha, exploratory factorial analysis and confirmatory factorial analysis were then proceeded with data collected. Results The mean drooling impact scale value for the whole population was 51.77 (SD = 16.13). The internal consistency obtained with Cronbach’s alpha indicated a value of 0.72 for the entire sample. The Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (p