Stroke is one of the main causes of morbidity and mortality in younger male adults and is particularly relevant to working individuals. When stroke at working-age, these patients must to face the challenges of employment and maintain the quality of life. How to comprehensively and objectively evaluation the opportunity of return to work is an important issue. The WHO Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0) was developed based on International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework for evaluating functioning, including social participation and cognition-related daily activities. WHODAS 2.0 can be a reliable comprehensive functional assessment tool, and the aim of this study was to investigate the predicting accuracy of return to work of male stroke patients at working-age.

A total of 7687 male stroke patients at working-age (aged from 25 to 55 years old) were obtained from Taiwan Data Bank of Persons with Disability from the July 2012 to October 2017. According to their working status, we separated them as return-to-work group and non-return to work group. Demographic data and WHODAS 2.0 standardized scores of patients with stroke of both groups were analyzed and compared using the Chi² and independent Student's t-tests. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was performed to investigate the prediction opportunity for the return-to-work status, and the optimal cutoff point was determined using the Youden index.

All domains of return-to-work group (n=481) had lower WHODAS 2.0 scores than non-return-to-work group (n=7206). The receiver operating characteristic curve showed moderate accuracy for all domain-specific and summary scores of WHODAS 2.0 [area under the curve, 0.6–0.8]. The cuff-off point of summary score was 39.67 with 70.0% sensitivity and 65.3% specificity.

Our study presented that WHODAS 2.0 can be taken as an assessment tool to predicting the opportunity of return to work of male stroke patients at working-age.