Special ArticlesHealth status versus quality of life in older patients: does the distinction matter?☆
Section snippets
Patients
Patients were enrolled in the Hospitalized Elderly Longitudinal Project—a four-hospital study of outcomes, preferences, and decision making for older patients (11)—and interviewed 2 months after a hospitalization. The project was conducted in tandem with the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatment (SUPPORT) and used similar methods 12, 13. From February to November 1994, we enrolled 1,266 persons 80 years of age or older who were hospitalized at one of
Results
Of the 1,057 patients who survived 2 months, 279 were not eligible for this study because they could not be interviewed by phone, generally because of either a severe hearing impairment or dementia, and 116 were not eligible because they failed a preinterview cognitive screen. Of the remaining 662 eligible patients, 169 did not complete interviews for the following reasons: patient refusal (n = 80); physician did not permit interview (n = 21); or other reasons, including logistic difficulties
Discussion
Most investigators purporting to measure quality of life actually measure various aspects of health status, conceptualizing these measures as health-related quality of life 2, 3. This approach has been criticized 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and defended (19). Much of the criticism has revolved around whether domain-specific measures of health status truly reflect quality of life. The goal of this study was to quantify the association between health-status measures and patients’ perceptions of their quality
Acknowledgements
We thank Sidney Katz, MD, Eva M. Kahana, PhD, and Mary-Margaret Chren, MD for their advice and thoughtful review of this manuscript.
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Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or its Board of Trustees. Dr. Covinsky was supported in part by a clinical investigator award from the National Institute on Aging (AG00714).