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Development of an Italian version of the functional communication measures and preliminary observations in patients with severe acquired brain injury and emerging from a prolonged disorder of consciousness

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Abstract

A proper assessment tool targeting communicative abilities in patients with severe acquired brain injury (sABI), and particularly for patients recovering from prolonged disorders of consciousness (pDoC), is lacking. The Functional Communication Measures (FCM) consists of a series of rating scales, ranging from 1 (least functional) to 7 (most functional), assessing cognitive requirements for communication and communicative abilities in patients with brain injury. Here we presented exploratory data concerning an Italian adaptation of FCM administered to patients with sABI. After the translation into Italian language, the FCM was blindly administered by 2 independent speech therapists to 19 patients (10 males; median age = 58; IQR = 25) admitted to neurorehabilitation unit after sABI with a level of cognitive functioning between 4 and 8. Two further patients who presented a pDoC after sABI and emerged from the minimally conscious state (a 64-year-old female and a 74-year-old female) were also evaluated by means of the FCM, the Coma Recovery Scale—Revised, and the Disability Rating Scale. Inter-rater agreement was almost perfect for attention, memory, and swallowing items, and substantial for communicative-augmentative communication, motor speech, spoken language expression, and spoken language comprehension. Importantly, in the two pDoC patients, the FCM identified two different functioning profiles in the attention, swallowing, motor speech, and spoken language expression scales, notwithstanding the two patients achieved the same scores on scales for functional disability and consciousness level. The FCM might be a promising and easy-to-administer tool to assess communicative functions in patients with sABI, independently from evaluation of functional disability.

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Data availability

The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This study was supported and funded by the Italian Ministry of Health - Ricerca Corrente 2019-2021.

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Author notes

  1. Francesco De Bellis and Alfonso Magliacano contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, Polo Specialistico Riabilitativo, 83054, Sant’Angelo Dei Lombardi (AV), Italy

    Francesco De Bellis, Cinzia Fasano, Marcella Spinola & Biagio Campana

  2. IRCCS Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, 50143, Florence, Italy

    Alfonso Magliacano & Anna Estraneo

  3. SM Della Pietà General Hospital, Neurology Unit, 80035, Nola, Italy

    Anna Estraneo

Authors
  1. Francesco De Bellis
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  2. Alfonso Magliacano
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  6. Anna Estraneo
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Contributions

Conceptualization: Francesco De Bellis and Anna Estraneo; data curation: Francesco De Bellis and Biagio Campana; formal analysis: Francesco De Bellis and Alfonso Magliacano; investigation: Francesco De Bellis, Cinzia Fasano, and Marcella Spinola; methodology: Francesco De Bellis, Alfonso Magliacano, Cinzia Fasano, Marcella Spinola, and Anna Estraneo; supervision: Biagio Campana and Anna Estraneo; writing—original draft: Francesco De Bellis and Alfonso Magliacano; writing—review and editing: Francesco De Bellis, Alfonso Magliacano, and Anna Estraneo.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco De Bellis.

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Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by the local Ethics Committee (protocol code FCM-DOC, date of approval: 03/03/2021).

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Informed consent for study participation and publication was obtained from all subjects involved in the study, by patients’ surrogate decision-makers and, where applicable, by patients themselves.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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The original online version of this article was revised: Originally, the article was published with missing Funding.

Funding This study was supported and funded by the Italian Ministry of Health - Ricerca Corrente 2019-2021.

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De Bellis, F., Magliacano, A., Fasano, C. et al. Development of an Italian version of the functional communication measures and preliminary observations in patients with severe acquired brain injury and emerging from a prolonged disorder of consciousness. Neurol Sci 43, 5267–5273 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-022-06173-x

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