2025 Volume 29 Issue 3 Pages 111-117
Objective: It is very important for the elderly in the community to identify the signs of dysphagia at an early stage, so that preventive methods can be practiced and early treatment can be provided, thereby prolonging healthy life expectancy. The aim of this study was to develop a simplified version of the Seirei Swallowing Questionnaire, with about five questions selected from the 15 questions of the questionnaire, to screen the elderly population for dysphagia in a simple way.
Methods: In this study, we used data from 50 patients with cerebrovascular disease diagnosed as having dysphagia, 145 patients with cerebrovascular disease diagnosed as having no dysphagia, and 170 healthy subjects, which were used when the Seirei Swallowing Questionnaire was developed. The method used to select about five questions from the 15 questions were: (1) in accordance with previous studies, the question “Do you feel that it is getting difficult to eat solid foods?”, which has a low specificity due to the influence of dentures and other factors, was excluded. (2) From the remaining 14 questions, the seven questions with the highest number of responses to each question as severe symptom A in patients with dysphagia were selected. (3) To reduce redundancy, the correlation between questions and the degree of agreement between responses were used as criteria for removing similar questions. (4) For combinations of five or six questions selected from seven questions, the optimal cut-off value, sensitivity, specificity and distance from the upper left corner of the ROC coordinates were calculated by ROC analysis, and the best combination among them was finally determined.
Result: The question “Do you ever choke when swallowing liquids?” was excluded as a redundant question. Five questions including “Do you ever choke during a meal?” were determined as the simplified version of the Seirei Swallowing Questionnaire. It had a cut-off value of 3 points, sensitivity of 88%, specificity of 87.3%, AUC of 0.92 and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.78.
Conclusion: The simplified version of the Seirei Swallowing Questionnaire (Swallow-5) developed in this study has excellent sensitivity and specificity and its use as a simplified screening tool for dysphagia is expected to increase.
