OBJECTIVES: Stroke is a high priority in healthcare's prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation. It significantly impacts the patient's quality of life, and a valid assessment of this can help in selecting an appropriate therapy. The Stroke Impact Scale (SIS) stroke-specific questionnaire measures the quality of life in nine dimensions, including the physical, mental, and emotional symptoms and the interpersonal relationships with excellent psychometric indicators. We aim to adapt the SIS to Hungarian.

METHODS: The adaptation process followed Beaton's internationally accepted six-step protocol. The translations were performed by an informed and an uninformed translator, then a third translator synthesized the Hungarian translation. Following the back translation, an expert committee review was the fourth stage: two neurologists, two linguistics professors, and two researchers produced the pre-final version of the questionnaire. At the pretesting stage, we had 30 retrospective, pre-planned cognitive interviews at the University of Pécs Clinical Centre Department of Neurology between February and April of 2023 among stroke patients in Baranya county (n=30). In addition to observing the internal consistency (Cronbach’s-alpha) of the questionnaire, we also collected sociodemographic and medical history data.

RESULTS: Our sample consisted of 18 men and 12 women with a mean age of 63.9 years (SD±13.75 years). 77% had ischaemic, 6% had hemorrhagic stroke, and 17% had TIA. 86.64% had cardiovascular diseases, 76.67% lived with hypertonia. 17 cases were treated conservatively, 7 with thrombolysis, 5 with thrombectomy, and 1 with a combination of both. A significant difference in the quality of life score was found between employed (OoL= 88.79 [SD±10.89]) and non-employed (QoL=70.16 [18.26]) individuals (p=0.002) The internal consistency is α=0.97 [0-1], with the lowest “Emotion” domain α=0.69 and the highest “Hand function” domain α=0.96.

CONCLUSIONS: The Hungarian version of the SIS has excellent internal consistency and is suitable for testing validity on a large sample.