Validation of the somatic symptom scale (SSS-8) in patients from a rural area in Ecuador

Abstract

ntroduction.- Somatic symptoms cause discomfort and affect the quality of life of patients increasing the frequency of use of health care services. In Ecuador, there is no validated instrument to evaluate somatization. Somatic Symtom Scale-8 (SSS-8) is an instrument used as a reference measurement in DSM-V, “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, to evaluate the charge of somatic symptoms. It has been validated in English and culturally adapted in German and Japanese.

Objectives.- This research aims to validate the Somatic Symptom Scale-8 and determine its metric properties.

Methods.- Descriptive and cross-sectional research in which clinical tool SSS-8 was validated in 401 outpatients of Pedro Vicente Maldonado Hospital, from May to July 2017. Statistical software applications SPSS version 23, Latent gold and EpiDat 3.1 were used for data analysis.

Outcomes.- The largest group was between 30 and 47 years old, with little predominance of male sex accounting for 52.6% over female sex with 47.4%. SSS-8 showed suitable metric properties (Cronbach’s alpha: 0.73). Analysis shows that patients who answered: something, quite or very much in dimensions feeling tired, headache, arm pain or backache have 99% of probability of presenting somatization.

Conclusions.- In this research, SSS-8 proved being a useful tool for evaluating somatic symptoms in outpatients since it presented good metric properties: high degree of internal consistency, good validity and appropriate discriminative capacity.