Psychometric properties of the Minnesota Living with Chronic Heart Failure Questionnaire in a Colombian population

Although the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire (MLHF-Q) is one of the most widely used tools to assess Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF), it has not been validated in Latin American Spanish-speaking populations. Objective: We evaluated internal consistency and construct validity of the MLHF-Q in patients with CHF from Colombia. Methods: The Spanish version of the MLHF-Q was given to 200 patients. Cronbach's alpha was used to evaluate internal consistency. Confirmatory factorial Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Rasch analysis were used to evaluate construct validity. The discriminative capacity was measured using the Mann-Whitney U test. Results: Median age was 64 years, 63% of the patients included in the study were men, and 79.5% had a left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) 45%. The median of the total score of HRQoL was 40 points (Q1=20; Q3=55), physical dimension 11 points (Q1=4; Q3=23) and emotional dimension 7 points (Q1=3; Q3=13). Global internal consistency of MLHF-Q was 0.91 (95% CI 0.89 -0.93). In the PCA, the three dimensions explained 47.7% and 54.0% in Rasch analysis, in which five items presented misfit. Worse HRQoL was observed among women than men in the emotional dimension (p=0.047). Discriminative capacity for the overall score of the MLHF-Q and their subscales was observed in age and New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class (p<0.05). Conclusions: Our findings confirmed the three-factor structure of the MLHF-Q, and satisfactory level for internal consistency. Additionally, these results suggest that the questionnaire adequately reflects the severity of the disease. However, further studies are required to validate these findings in Colombian population and to evaluate the sensitivity to change of the MLHF-Q in longitudinal designs.