Feasibility and reliability of health-related quality of life measurements among tuberculosis patients

Abstract

The dramatic global impact of tuberculosis on mortality has been well documented, but its impact on morbidity has not been well described. The emphasis on treatment of latent tuberculosis (TB) infection highlights the tradeoff between short-term decrements in health status from 'preventive' therapy, and long-term gains related to fewer cases of active TB. However, these changes in health status have not been characterized. As a first step, we examined the feasibility and reliability of administering two health status questionnaires, in a multicultural TB clinic setting. The Medical Outcomes Study SF-36 and the EuroQOL EQ-5D were self-administered during 3 weekly interviews. One hundred and eighty-six potentially eligible patients were identified, of whom 112 could be evaluated; 106 (57%) were confirmed eligible. Sixty-seven (63%) agreed to participate; 24 (36%) were women. Fifty-three participants (79%) were foreign-born, with median residence in Canada of 3.5 years. Fifty (75%) of the participants completed all study measurements: 25 were treated for latent TB, 17 for active TB, and eight had previous active TB. Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.73 to 0.94 for the SF-36 domain scores. Intraclass correlation coefficients were 0.66 for the SF-36 physical component summary, 0.79 for the mental component summary, and 0.73 for the EQ-5D. These instruments appeared reliable in a highly selected group of TB patients.

Health Status and Quality of Life in Tuberculosis: Systematic Review of Study Design, Instruments, Measuring Properties and Outcomes

“…Another study used normative data from the Canadian population as the reference group and two studies included people with LTBI controls [20,30,39]. The sample size varied among all the studies and only one study reported statistical analysis of sample size [30]. In this review, all kinds of TB patients pulmonary TB, extra pulmonary TB, active TB disease, late TB infection, current TB and recurrent TB were included.…”

“…An article published by Chamla et al [16] described the comparison of TB population group from general population. Another study used normative data from the Canadian population as the reference group and two studies included people with LTBI controls [20,30,39]. The sample size varied among all the studies and only one study reported statistical analysis of sample size [30].…”

“…All these articles were published in English. The data was based on comparative studies of TB population from China , two from Malaysia [18,23], five from India [14,15,29,[35][36][37][38], four from Canada [5,24,25,30] one form each UK [17] Pakistan [35], Spain [36] Taiwan [28] South Africa [37] and Turkey [39]. Among the selected articles fourteen studies were cross sectional [5,14,26,27,30,33,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40] and sixteen were prospective cohort based studies [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]29,31,32,41].…”

A Study on Assessment of Patients Health Related Quality of Life During Tuberculosis Treatment in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital

“…10,14 A patient with tuberculosis faces several physiological, psychological, financial and social problems. These problems have a great impact on the well-being of the patient and impair the quality of life of the patient suffering from tuberculosis.…”

“…In these patients, mental and social well-being as well as physical health are affected by the disease and its related long-termtreatment. 10 Therefore, it is required to investigate the QoL of TB patients to recognize appropriate actions for improvement of health status and the QoL among the patients.…”