Recent evidence indicates that a spouse's perception and understanding of a service member's combat exposure and reasons for functional difficulties have a significant bearing on marital satisfaction (Renshaw et al. 2008).
Deimling et al. [ 13] studied older adult survivors (mean age 72.3 years, range <60 - >75 years) reporting that elderly cancer survivors were vulnerable for functional difficulties, and to comorbid health conditions, where pain was the most common symptom attributed to cancer or cancer treatment.
The remaining fit statistics were very similar for the two domains: CFI values were 0.91 and 0.90 for functional difficulty and functional pain, respectively; TLI values were 0.96 for both; and RMSEA values were 0.090 and 0.096, respectively.
A high level of accuracy was observed in the Pearson correlation coefficients between the 5-, 10, and 15-item OA-FUNCTION-CATs and the full item banks, which were 0.92, 0.96, and 0.97, respectively, for functional difficulty, and 0.89, 0.95, and 0.97, respectively, for functional pain.
Reasons for greater functional difficulties in some survivors are not entirely clear and cannot be entirely related to the degree of transplant complications, especially chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) or prior therapy received by this population.
Similarly, there were 2 (0.6%) subjects at the ceiling for OA-FUNCTION-CAT functional difficulty compared with 10 (3%) for the WOMAC physical function scale.
The fact that patients with degrading vision can, to a certain extent, overcome functional difficulties – for example by using magnifying glasses, screen-projection devices or other low-vision aids and devices – makes it interesting to figure out if the caregiver cost burden correlates with the vision loss of the affected patient.
Any alterations within the five systems will cause functional difficulties for the infant and affect overall self regulation.
For the functional difficulty scale, 95% of the sample scores achieved reliability estimates greater than 0.97 for the OA-FUNCTION-CAT compared with 0.76 for the WOMAC.
Our sample at baseline consisted of people waiting for surgery and thus certainly experiencing some functional difficulties.
Breadth of item coverage for the OA-FUNCTION-CAT functional difficulty and functional pain item banks and corresponding WOMAC scales is shown in Figure 2. Item coverage is displayed as the range of a person's scores that correspond to the highest and lowest values of expected item response categories in each scale.
