Predictive ability of motion sickness susceptibility questionnaire for motion sickness individual difference in Chinese young males.

Motion sickness has great individual differences in susceptibility. The present study tried to investigate the predictive ability of motion sickness susceptibility questionnaire (MSSQ) for descriminating susceptible (SUS) and insusceptible (INSUS) subjects in two cohorts of young male volunteers who received real ship motion (n = 115) or laboratory vertical oscillation motion test (n = 77). Predictive ability of the MSSQ and its Nausea and Vomiting sub-scales (including child and adult part) was examined via analyzing area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) with motion sickness susceptibility judged by Graybiel score or nausea latency. MSSQ and its sub-scores positively correlated with the Graybiel score in both tests. The Nausea child -scores showed no predictive ability for the INSUS subjects, leading to lower AUC of the Nausea sub-total than the Vomiting sub-total and the MSSQ total scores for INSUS prediction in both the ship motion (0.587 vs. 0.647 and 0.644) and the vertical oscillation test (0.696 vs. 0.761 and 0.788) when seasickness susceptibility was defined by Graybiel score. Vomiting child scores seemed to be better than Nausea child scores for INSUS prediction in both tests. Lower AUC of the Nausea sub-total score than the MSSQ total score (0.691 vs. 0.758) was observed due to invalidity of Nausea child score when susceptibility was defined by nausea latency in the vertical oscillation test. The predictive ability for SUS did not differ among MSSQ sub-scores in both tests. Relative to the ship motion test, the vertical oscillation test showed higher predictive ability of the MSSQ total score for the Graybiel score-defined SUS subjects (0.840 vs. 0.686) as a result of higher AUC in both the Vomiting (0.840 vs. 0.690) and the Nausea sub-total scores (0.806 vs. 0.651). These results suggested that MSSQ had significant but limited predictive ability for seasickness susceptibility which varied with motion pattern, slightly differed among sub-scales, and could be decreased when assessing insusceptible subjects among Chinese young males.