Assessment of reliability and validity of the Persian version of the Parkinson's Anxiety Scale (P-PAS)

Abstract

Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric manifestations in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). They generally affect one-third of patients and greatly impact their quality of life. There have been several scales for diagnosing anxiety disorders. However, none were created distinctively for PD and lacked the diagnostic qualities for PD patients. The Parkinson's Anxiety Scale (PAS) was created to address this issue, and it has demonstrated good psychometric features since. In this study, our aim was to assess the validity and reliability of the Persian adaptation of PAS (P-PAS). The study included 52 patients from Shohada-e-Tajrish Hospital's Movement Disorders clinic. During their visits, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and P-PAS were collected. Demographical data and disease history were obtained from the hospital dataset. Two weeks later, the P-PAS was taken from the patients for the second time by phone. Thirty-one (59.6) of our patients were men. The mean age of the patients was 63.79. The majority (59.6) of the patients had a Hoehn and Yahr stage of 2. Disease duration had a median of 5 years and a range of 1 to 23 years. Cronbach's alpha was 0.839. The intra-class correlation between the two P-PAS was 0.777. P-PAS had a correlation of 0.866, 0.785, and 0.508 with BAI, HADS-Anxiety (HADS-A), and HADS-Depression (HADS-D), respectively. P-PAS exhibited acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability. It demonstrated good divergent and convergent validity. P-PAS is a reliable and valid scale for use in clinical settings.