What is it about?

This work shows that patient-reported outcomes are not interchangeable. Quality of life cannot be measured with a tool that measures health status ie symptoms and functioning. The findings reported in this paper show the important differences and similarities between different patient-reported outcomes.

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Why is it important?

Health status tools such as the EQ-5D and SF-36 are often inappropriately used and interpreted as if they are measuring quality of life. This is highly misleading because health may improve while quality of life is damaged and vice versa. We need to measure health outcomes and quality of life outcomes and be clear that they are not are the same thing.

Perspectives

The ADDQoL (Audit of Diabetes-Dependent Quality of Life) used in this work was the first of a series of innovative individualised condition-specific measures of the impact of a condition on quality of life, in this case the impact of diabetes. These -DQoL measures recognise that not all aspects of life are relevant to everyone (eg work, family, holidays) and individuals vary in how important any one relevant aspect of life is to their quality of life as well as varying in the impact of their condition on each aspect of life. The -DQoL measures build these considerations into a single score which can be compared across the many conditions for which a -DQoL measure is available. NICE no longer need to use a simplistic health status tool (EQ-5D) to make comparisons across conditions in the (misguided) belief that they are measuring quality of life. To find -DQoL measures for other endocrine conditions, eye conditions, renal failure, aneurysms, HIV, dementia and Parkinson's disease, please visit www.healthpsychologyresearch.com. New condition-specific tools are readily designed using the -DQoL template and item library with only modest numbers of interviews with patients needed.

Clare Bradley
Royal Holloway, University of London

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Predictors of Quality of Life and Other Patient-Reported Outcomes in the PANORAMA Multinational Study of People With Type 2 Diabetes, Diabetes Care, November 2017, American Diabetes Association,
DOI: 10.2337/dc16-2655.
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