It is valuable for clinicians to have a measure of the dizziness handicap of pediatric patients.
However, children are not yet sufficiently mature to express their dizziness exactly. Parents, who spend much time with their children, are an excellent source of information about their children's problem. The Dizziness Handicap Inventory for Patient Caregivers (DHI-PC) is a questionnaire in which a parent answers questions that are posed to evaluate the degrees of handicap in the daily lives of pediatric patients with dizziness on a scale, with a “No”, “Sometimes”, or “Yes”. The target age of the subjects for the original version of DHI-PC is under 13 years old. The reliability of the Japanese version of the DHI-PC (DHI-PC-J) has been reported in 2018. The aim of the present study was to examine whether the target age can be extended to 17 years old. The DHI-PC-J was administered to 40 caregivers of pediatric patients between the ages of 5-17 years old. The subjects were classified into two groups according to their age: ≤12 years old and ≥13 years old. The DHI-PC-J scores showed significant correlations with the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) score of dizziness handicap in each age group. This result indicates that the DHI-PC-J is a reliable questionnaire that can be used to assess the degree of handicap in the daily lives of pediatric patients under 18 years old with dizziness in Japan.
