INTRODUCTION
Patient-reported outcome measures (PROM) are essential for the evaluation of facial palsy. The most commonly used PROM for facial palsy is the Facial Clinimetric Evaluation (FaCE) scale, which consists of 15 questions with a 5-point Likert scale.1,2 It consists of six subscales – facial movement, facial comfort, oral function, eye comfort, lacrimal control, and social function – which sum up to a total score representing ‘overall’ facial palsy-related quality of life. The current importance of each subscale in calculating the total score is determined by the number of questions composing each subscale. It has not been analyzed whether FaCE subscales’ weight in the total score reflects subscales’ importance to overall facial palsy-specific quality of life. In this study, we aim to calculate the contribution of the FaCE subscales to overall quality of life.
METHODS
Institutional review board approval was acquired before the start of this study. Facial palsy patients older than 18 years and fluent in Dutch visiting the outpatient clinic of a tertiary plastic surgery center were invited for participation between June and August 2020.
Patients were asked to complete the validated Dutch FaCE questionnaire and to score overall facial palsy-related burden on a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). As the FaCE scale addresses impairments experienced in the past week, the VAS was also used to score the burden experienced during the previous week.
The reliability and validity of the VAS were tested in a separate group of patients visiting the same outpatient clinic. On two occasions (T1 and T2), 1 week apart, patients were asked to complete both the FaCE scale and the VAS.