The brief pain inventory (Bpi), hebrew version: A psychometric validation

The Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) is a simple tool for the assessment of pain and its impact, widely used in clinical and research pain medicine. It has been translated and validated in many languages. Despite its widespread use in Israel, it has undergone linguistic validation only. We devised the current study to complete a psychometric validation of the Hebrew version of the BPI. Methods: The study included 163 patients from two pain clinics. Patients were asked to complete the questionnaire twice, once before the beginning of a routine visit and again at its conclusion (an interval of about 30 minutes). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), explanatory factor analysis (EFA), and internal consistency reliability analyses were conducted. Results: Of the 163 patients, 53.4% were females, and the mean age was 57.65 ± 16.45 years. The most common diagnosis was low back pain (58.9%). CFA confirmed the 2-factor structure of the BPI (pain interference and pain severity). In the EFA, 11 BPI items were loaded onto two factors. The rotated solution of the two factors accounted for 63.29% of the variance. We found a high degree of correlation between test and retest results for each item separately and for each of the two subscales: pain severity (r = 0.877, p < 0.001) and pain interference (r = 0.855, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The Hebrew version of the BPI is a useful and reliable tool to assess pain in Hebrew speaking non-cancer pain patients.