Validity and reliability of the Michigan Neuropathy Screening Instrument (MNSI) on the Diabetic type II patients (Thai version)

Abstract

The Michigan Neuropathy Screening Instrument (MNSI) has been used to screen for the diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) of diabetic foot in DM type II patient. MNSI are consisting of the questionnaire or subjective (15 items) and objective examination (10 items) parts. The original English version of MNSI has been translated and used in many languages, except Thai. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the validity and reliability of MNSI used for screening the diabetic foot in DM patients with and without DPN.  The subjective examination part was translated to Thai and back-translated by Languages Center, Khon Kaen University and content validity tested by expert panel. MNSI was used to evaluate the construct validity and the test-retest reliability (Intra-class Correlation Coefficient: ICC) in 100 patients, age between 18-70 years of DM patients with and without DPN from the Diabetic Outpatient Clinic at Srisaket hospital, Srisaket province. Each patient was interviewed and physical examined two times, each time one week apart. Results revealed that both groups showed the high reliability which the ICC greater than 0.90 both subjective and objective examination parts (P < 0.001). Moreover, the DPN group was reported the mean scores of both subjective and objective examination parts higher than the non-DPN group. These differences were the statistics significant between two groups (P < 0.001) of both subjective and objective parts of MNSI as 6.2 (95% CI, 5.7-6.6) and 3.0 (95% CI, 2.2-3.7) scores, respectively. In conclusion, MNSI Thai version showed acceptable reliability and validity. It may be used to as a screening test the peripheral neuropathy on DM type II for clinical setting in the future.