Abstract

We are grateful for having the opportunity to reply to the letter from Stephen McKenna and John Brodersen [1], in which the authors discuss several issues related to our work. Our study was intended to pursue the work begun by others to provide normative data on the quality of life assessment of growth hormone deficiency in adults (QoL-AGHDA) questionnaire to help interpret QoL-AGHDA data collected in growth hormone deficient (GHD) patients. In this context, we aimed to complete previous studies that enabled reference values for the QoL-AGHDA questionnaire to be collected in general populations in European countries [2,3,4,5,6]. Therefore, we would like to provide some clarification as it seems that the objective of our work has not been fully understood by the authors of the letter to editor.

The QoL-AGHDA questionnaire was developed according to the needs-based approach of QoL, and is indeed intended to be used in GHD patients and not in healthy individuals. Thus, the questionnaire was psychometrically validated in GHD patients in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Spain [7]. The translation and psychometric validation of the French version of the QoL-AGHDA questionnaire in GHD patients was undertaken and published by Leplège et al. [8] in 2003. In 2000, Wiren et al. [6] published a work aiming to validate the QoL-AGHDA questionnaire in Sweden using Rasch analysis and to compare the QoL of GHD patients to that of a random sample of the Swedish population [6]. Reference values were collected in other European countries [2,3,4,5], but without measuring the scaling properties of the QoL-AGHDA questionnaire in general populations. The main purpose of our study was to collect reference QoL-AGHDA data for the French general population. To ensure scientifically sound results to be produced, we also assessed the psychometric properties of the French QoL-AGHDA questionnaire in our study sample.