Semantic equivalence of Pediatric Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire for nutritional screening in pediatric patients with cancer

Objective:

Perform the semantic equivalence of Pediatric Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment and its adaptation to the Portuguese language for use in pediatric patients hospitalized with cancer.

Methods:

The semantic equivalence process involved the following steps: translation, synthesis of translations, back-translation, discussion with Expert Committee and pre-test, steps that took place at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and at the Instituto Nacional de Câncer José Alencar Gomes da Silva. The questionnaire was pretested in 32 patients with pediatric cancer, of the aged 2-18 years, to check its suitability in this population.

Results:

All steps justified the equivalence semantics of the instrument. Discrete changes were necessary in the Pediatric Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment instrument for the Brazilian context. According to the responses of each free expert for each of the 56 assertions, 81% of the responses were classified as "unchanged". It was a good semantic equivalence between the translation and the back-translation and the original version.

Conclusion:

The Brazilian version of Pediatric Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment was well understood by the study population and was adequate to continue with the remaining steps of cross-cultural adaptation and validation tool for further application in hospitalized pediatric patients with cancer.

Nutrition assessment; Cross-cultural comparison; Neoplasms; Pediatrics; Triage