Evaluation of stroke patients with the extended activities of daily living scale in Taiwan

Purpose: This study examined the construct validity of the Nottingham Extended Activities of Daily Living scale (EADL) in stroke patients in Taiwan. Methods: The EADL and the Barthel Index were administered via telephone interview. Minor revisions were made for the EADL to reflect cultural differences and the recommendations of two previous studies on the use of EADL. One hundred and fifty three stroke patients from the community participated in the study. Results: Two items, 'make hot snack' and 'write letters', were deleted from the EADL because they appeared to be of little discriminative value. The results suggest that a changed hierarchical order was present among the domestic and leisure subscales. All of the subscales, then, fulfilled the Guttman scaling criteria (coefficient of reproducibility > 0.9, coefficient of scalability > 0.6). The scores of the revised EADL were significantly related to age and the Barthel Index scores (Spearman correlation coefficients = -0.41 and 0.69, respectively, p < 0.001). There was no significant difference between the overall scores of men and women (median=10, 10, respectively, Mann Whitney U test, p = 0.67). Conclusion: These data support the validity of the EADL with minor modifications in the evaluation of the functional performance in stroke patients in Taiwan and confirm it to be a useful outcome measure in stroke research.