How did the Seattle Angina Questionnaire come to be, and why is it named that?
The Seattle Angina Questionnaire (SAQ) was developed by Dr. John Spertus as a research project during his cardiology fellowship and masters of public health studies at the University of Washington — which is located in Seattle. Although his friends urged him to name it the “Spertus Angina Questionnaire”, John opted to use Seattle in the name. John’s process for creating the SAQ included these steps: • He constructed the SAQ’s questions using psychological research that explains how patients understand and communicate about their physical conditions. • He defined a statistical analysis approach that correlates patient responses to the questions to other existing data — such as treadmill results, for instance. • He performed large-scale validation studies that compared SAQ data against these other data and used these results to further refine the questions. This work was all done in the early 1990s, and the SAQ has been in regular use in research settings ever since. Its use in regular c
