INTRODUCTIONThe aim of this review is to provide a summary of adult measures of general health and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) commonly used in rheumatology research studies. Currently, there is no single generally agreed upon definition or conceptual model of health or HRQOL, and developing a comprehensive definition of these complex concepts was beyond the scope of the review. For the purposes of this review, we define measures of general health and HRQOL as multi-item questionnaires that assess perceived health status and overall physical and emotional well-being that is not specific to any disease. The health measures included in this review were further subdivided into generic health profiles (questionnaires that provide assessment of more than 1 dimension of health status) and health utility measures that provide an overall measure of health status rated between perfect health (1.0) and death (0.0).Relevant measures were identified (using medical subject headings [MeSH]) through a systematic search of medical publications indexed to PubMed database. The following search queries were used: [Quality of life (title) AND Outcomes assessment (MeSH terms) AND Rheumatic diseases (MeSH terms)] and [Quality of life (abstract) AND Outcomes assessment (MeSH terms) AND Rheumatic diseases (MeSH terms)]. In MeSH, "rheumatic diseases" are defined as "disorders of connective tissue, especially the joints and related structures, characterized by inflammation, degeneration, or metabolic derangement," and include rheumatoid arthritis, Caplan's syndrome, Sjö gren's syndrome, Still's disease, fibromyalgia, gout, hyperostosis, osteoarthritis, and polymyalgia rheumatica among others.Inclusion criteria were 1) the study was concerned with a rheumatology condition and 2) participants were human adults. The first query returned 129 items and the second query returned 494 items, with 623 abstracts in total. After removal of 77 duplicates, 38 pediatric studies, and 2 animal studies, 2 reviewers (LB, EP) screened abstracts independently of the remaining 506 publications to identify relevant multi-item questionnaires (i.e., those generic questionnaires that were identified by the study authors as being used for the purpose of assessing general health or HRQOL). Where abstracts contained insufficient information to determine the type of measures used, full publications were obtained.The reviewers, working independently, identified 10 generic health utility measures and 5 generic health profiles (Table 1). Agreement about the type and number of occurrences of relevant measures in the sample of reviewed Drs.
S383abstracts was very high (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.996). Any disagreements were resolved through a discussion between all authors. Given the large number of potentially relevant measures identified, only those measures that were used at least 4 times in the screened abstracts were selected for this review.
