Evaluation of health-related quality of life in cardiovascular research: a call for action

Abstract

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in many countries around the world. With increasing survival after acute cardiac events, patient-reported outcome measures such as health status and health-related quality-of-life (HRQL) are becoming increasingly important.An IHD-specific HRQL questionnaire, called HeartQoL, has been designed, developed and validated with the support of the European Association for Preventive Cardiology and results have been published in 2014. The questionnaire has been designed to assess baseline HRQL, make betweendiagnosis comparisons of HRQL and to evaluate changes in patients with angina, myocardial infarction, or heart failure with a single core IHD-specific HRQL instrument. The HeartQoL questionnaire contains 14 questions and is easy to use, and has been validated in patients with angina, myocardial infarction, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, implantable cardioverter defibrillator and heart surgery, has been translated into 32 languages and has been used in more than 50 published studies. However, HRQL is still not routinely assessed in cardiovascular research or clinical practice. In view of the importance of HRQL as outcome measure, researchers and clinicians are encouraged to consider the IHD-specific HeartQoL as patient-related outcome measure to asses HRQL in their research projects as well as in their clinical practice.