Body awareness and chronic low back pain: validity and reliability study of Turkish version of body awareness rating scale

Abstract

Background/aim: Previous studies reported that patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP) had trouble describing senses or bodyfunctions. A questionnaire, the body awareness rating questionnaire (BARQ), was recently developed for assessing body awareness.The aim of the study was to develop a Turkish version of the BARQ and investigate the validity and reliability in patients with CLBP.Materials and methods: BARQ translated to Turkish with forward-backward method. Ninety-nine patients with CLBP and 101 healthycontrols (HC) completed the BARQ-T. Fifty-one of patients with CLBP and HC repeated BARQ-T 3 days later. In addition to BARQ-T,Oswestry disability index (ODI), pain severity, short form 36 (SF-36) and Toronto alexithymia scale (TAS) were administered.Results: The current study found good-excellent Cronbach’s alpha values for patients with CLBP (α: between 0.883–0.967) andacceptable-good Cronbach’s alpha values for HC (α: between 0.649–0.825) in factors of BARQ-T. ICC values for test-retest validity werefound to be good-excellent for patients with CLBP in all factors. BARQ-T was positively correlated with SF-36 and negatively correlatedwith ODI and TAS (P < 0.05).Conclusion: The study confirmed that the BARQ-T has acceptable validation and reliability in terms of pain perception and painassessment in the Turkish CLBP community.