Development of reliable and valid measures of nausea and vomiting

Abstract

Few instruments that measure separately the patient's perception of nausea and vomiting are reported in the literature. The pattern of occurrence and the amount of distress caused by each of these common symptoms is unknown for the individual chemotherapeutic agents and drug combinations. Two instruments, the adapted form of the McCorkle and Young symptom distress scale (ASDS) and the index of nausea and vomiting (INV). were developed to measure both nausea and vomiting. These tools were administered to 32 cancer patients who were beginning an initial chemotherapy regime and 72 well citizens in a pilot study designed to develop and test the reliability and validity of these measures. Data are presented that show the tools are reliable and that they validly measure post-treatment nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy patients. This pilot effort is important to the future study of patterns and effective nursing interventions to control the problems of both nausea and vomiting.