Proxy and patients ratings on quality of life in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in Korea

Abstract

These findings suggest that family proxy rating of patients' QoL can be used as a reasonable estimate of the patients' QoL for stable schizophrenia and bipolar patients in Korea.

The World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale Brief Version: a validation study in patients with schizophrenia

“…The suitability of the scale, the aspects it covers, its reliability and validity in other populations make it promising for the assessment of patients with schizophrenia [30][31][32][33][34] although no validation is available. This work addresses this issue by validating this instrument in a sample of patients with schizophrenia.…”

Transferability/generalizability deserves more attention in ‘retest’ studies in Diagnosis and Prognosis

“…The studies contained results from 10 countries across five continents: Australia [28,31], Brazil [30,34,35], Czech Republic [35], Germany [35], Republic of Korea [32], Kuwait [25], Spain [35], Sudan [26,27], Turkey [35], and the United Kingdom [35].…”

“…We grouped persons into the three broad categories of (1) mental health (n 5 604): schizophrenia, major affective disorder, neurosis, bipolar disorder, and psychosis [26,31,32]; (2) intellectual disability (n 5 614): mild learning disability [35]; (3) Physical health (n 5 762): cancer, type 2 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and infertility [25,27,28,30,34]. As Awadalla et al [26] reported three groups of persons with mental health problems, we analyzed these separately.…”

“…In six studies, proxies were close family members: cohabiting partners and spouses [30,34], family members living-in or with regular contact [25,26,27], and unspecified family members [32]. In two studies, proxies were health care professionals: nurses [28] and case managers [30].…”

“…Seven reported means and standard deviations in each WHOQOL-BREF domain for proxy and person [25,26,30e32,34,35]. In addition, two studies reported the ICC [32,35]. These were the measures used in the quantitative analyses.…”