Translation, cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the General Movement checklist

Background. The General Movement checklist, recently developed by Aizawa et al. is an alternative, accessible, and affordable tool for usage by health care professionals who are not certified or trained in Prechtl's General Movement Assessment. Aim To validate of the Spanish version of the General Movement checklist in preterm and full-term Mexican children and to evaluate its reliability, content, criterion and predictive validity. Methods Observational, cross-sectional, descriptive study. Videos of preterm and term infants at high neurological risk were included. The inter- and intraobserver reliability of the General Movement checklist in its original version was analysed. Translation and cross-cultural adaptation to Spanish were performed, following international guidelines. Content, criterion and predictive validity were determined using the General Movement Optimality Score-Revised (GMOS-R) and the clinical diagnosis at 2 years corrected age. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves were generated to identify the cut-off points on the General Movement checklist. Results The reliability of the instrument was very good. According to the experts, the content validity of the Spanish versión of the instrument was good. A total of 105 videos were evaluated using the Spanish version of the instrument. High sensitivity and specificity were obtained when comparing the results with the GMOS-R and clinical diagnosis and a cut-off point of 10 was determined. Conclusions The Spanish version of the General Movement checklist is a reliable and valid instrument for its use in the Mexican population and it could also be used in some other Spanish-speaking populations,