Psychosocial Assessment of Transplant Candidates: Inter-rater Reliability and Concurrent Validity of the Japanese Version of the Stanford Integrated Psychosocial Assessment for Transplantation

Background: The Stanford Integrated Psychosocial Assessment for Transplantation (SIPAT) is a compre-hensive instrument developed to provide a standardized, objective, and evidence-based psychosocial evaluation of the main pretransplant psychosocial risk factors that may influence transplant outcomes. Objective: Because established assessment procedures or standardized tools designed to perform pre-solid organ transplant psychosocial evaluation are currently unavailable in Japan, the present study aimed to develop and preliminarily validate the Japanese version of the SIPAT. Methods: First, the Japanese version of the SIPAT was developed using standard forward-back -translation procedures. Then, the Japanese versions of the SIPAT and the Japanese version of Psychosocial Assessment of Candidates for Transplant were retrospectively and blindly applied to 107 transplant cases by 4 independent raters. Results: The interrater reliability of the scores obtained with the Japanese version of the SIPAT was excellent (Pearson's correla-tion coefficient = 0.86). The concurrent validity of the SIPAT to the Psychosocial Assessment of Candidates for Transplant for each examiner was substantial (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient = 20.66). Conclusion: These findings suggest that the Japanese version of the SIPAT is a promising and reliable in-strument. Further research is required to test the pre-dictive validity of the Japanese version of the SIPAT.