BACKGROUND: tinnitus can cause damage to the life quality of patients. The assessment of to what extent a patient's quality of life has been affected by tinnitus can be useful to understand the limitations imposed by this symptom. Also it can be useful for therapeutic programming and for the verification of therapy effectiveness (pre and post treatment evaluation). AIM: to culturally adapt the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), to use it with the Brazilian population and to evaluate its reproducibility. METHOD: the cultural adaptation of the THI (Newman et al., 1996) followed the steps indicated by Guillemin et al., (1993), which include the translation from English to Portuguese, linguistic adaptation and revision of the grammatical and idiomatic equivalences. Assessment of inter and intra-researcher reproducibility of results was also made. Participants of this study were thirty patients (19 females, 63,3% and 11 males, 36,7%) with tinnitus from an otoneurology specialized ambulatory, with ages between 39 and 79 years. RESULTS: the THI was adapted in order to be used with the Brazilian population and was named Brazilian Tinnitus Handicap Inventory. There was no statistically significant difference regarding inter and intra-researcher reproducibility of the results when using the Brazilian version of the questionnaire. A decline in the quality of life regarding emotional, functional and/or catastrophic aspects was observed for all of the assessed patients. CONCLUSION: the THI was translated and culturally adapted in order to be used with the Brazilian population, demonstrating to be a reliable instrument to verify the damage caused by tinnitus in the quality of life of individuals.
Tinnitus; Quality of Life; Questionnaires; Disability Evaluation; Reproducibility of Results
