Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Arabic Project for the Epidemiological Analysis of Critical Care Patients (PAEEC) scale in individuals with traumatic brain injury in Lebanon

The aim of this study is to cross-culturally adapt the Project for the Epidemiological Analysis of Critical Care Patients (PAEEC) Quality of Life (QoL) scale into the Arabic language and to examine its clinimetric properties, including validity and reliability among Lebanese native speaker with traumatic brain injury (TBI). This is a cross-sectional study including 49 men with TBI aged between 20 and 59 years. The Arabic version of the PAEEC (PAEEC-A) was administered to the subjects or their primary caregiver as well as the Short Form Health Survey 36 (SF-36). The internal consistency, test-retest reliability, content, construct and convergent validity were evaluated. The PAEEC-A displayed high internal consistency (Chronbach's alpha = 0.916) and test-retest reliability (Intraclass Correlation coefficient = 0.966). Exploratory factor analysis extracted a 3-factor model that explained 68.48% of the total variance. As for the convergent validity, Spearman correlations between the PAEEC-A total score and the physical and mental components of the SF-36 were -0.788 and -0.794, respectively (p-value < 0.0001 for both). The findings indicate that the PAEEC-A has robust clinimetric properties and is a valid and reliable quality of life measure among Lebanese men with traumatic brain injury.