PURPOSE: This study aimed to assess factors affecting knowledge of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (knee OA) among Malaysian railway workers.
METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 513 railway workers involving eight major states within Peninsular Malaysia using population-based sampling. The assessment instrument was a face-validated, prepiloted, self-administered instrument with sociodemographics and knowledge items on knee OA.
RESULTS: Mean (± SD) age of the respondents was 41.4 (± 10.7), with the majority aged 50 years or older (34.9%). Of the total respondents, 53.6% had low levels of knowledge of knee OA disease. Multivariate analysis found that four demographic predictors, age ≥ 50 years, family history of knee OA, self-awareness, and clinical diagnosis of the disease entity, were significantly associated with knowledge scores.
CONCLUSION: The finding of a low level knee OA knowledge among Malaysian railway workers points to an urgent need for massive information to be disseminated among the workers at risk to foster primary prevention and self-care.
METHODS: The translation was conducted based on the principles of the most widely used model in questionnaire translation, namely Brisling's back-translation model. A written authorization allowing translation into Arabic was obtained from the original author. The Arabic version of the questionnaire was distributed to 480 participants to evaluate construct validity. Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 17.0 for Windows was used for the statistical analysis.
RESULTS: The response rate of this study was 96%; most of the respondents (52.5%) were female. Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach's α, which showed that this questionnaire provides a high reliability coefficient (reaching 0.9299) and a high degree of consistency and thus can be relied upon in future patient satisfaction research.