A Review of Quality of Life Measures in Dry Eye Questionnaires

Abstract

Purpose Dry eye disease (DED) is an ocular disease that affects 5% to 17% of the US population. Because of the negative effects of DED on patients’ quality of life (QOL), disease-specific questionnaires that assess QOL in patients with dry eyes are essential in the monitoring and management of this chronic ocular condition. This review provides clinicians and researchers with a summary of the current questionnaires available for assessing QOL in patients with dry eyes. Methods A systematic review of the literature was performed in March 2013. Results There are only 2 validated, reliable dry eye questionnaires with QOL measures currently available for clinic use: the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI) and the Impact of Dry Eye on Everyday Life questionnaire (IDEEL). Multiple other dry eye questionnaires assess some degree of QOL, but they have either not been tested for validity and reliability or are limited in QOL measures they assess. Conclusions The OSDI and IDEEL are validated, reliable disease-specific questionnaires that assess QOL measures in patients with DED. Because of its extensive development process and multiple QOL measures, the IDEEL offers a more thorough assessment of the effect of DED on QOL for clinical trials, whereas the OSDI may be the more convenient option for clinical use as a result of its shorter completion time. Other questionnaires used to assess QOL in DED (eg, 25-item National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire and Texas Eye Research and Technology Center DEQ) are fairly limited in this assessment. Finally, because of the negative effects of DED on QOL, this review emphasizes the importance of including QOL measures in future questionnaires for the monitoring and management of DED.

Patients' perception of DED and its relation with time to diagnosis and quality of life: an international and multilingual survey

“…To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of how prediagnosis history impacted patients' lives, an aspect left out of existing questionnaires on DED-related symptoms/QoL 20 21. We also gathered language-specific information on keywords used by patients to spontaneously describe their ocular condition.…”

Concordance Between Patient and Clinician Assessment of Dry Eye Severity and Treatment Response in Taiwan

“…Compared with other questionnaires, the OSDI is a more convenient option for clinical use because of its shorter completion time. 31 The low agreement between patient and clinician assessment may indicate that ophthalmologists in Taiwan need better and more accurate quantitative tools to improve the concordance in severity assessment. To date, there is no available universally accepted gold standard test that is reliable to assess dry eye severity.…”

Benefits of omega-3 fatty acid dietary supplementation on health-related quality of life in patients with meibomian gland dysfunction

“…Differences when compared with patients assigned to a placebo group were statistically significant for both the physical and mental components of the SF-36 weighed against baseline. In the present study, we used a generic HRQoL instrument instead of generic visual function or specific dry eye questionnaires 26. A number of studies have shown the detrimental effect of dry eye syndrome on vision-related quality of life 27–29.…”