The QOLIBRI provides information about patient's subjective perception of his/her HRQoL which supplements clinical measures and measures of functional outcome. It can be applied across different populations and cultures. It allows the identification of personal needs, the prioritization of therapeutic goals and the evaluation of individual progress. It may also be useful in clinical trials and in longitudinal studies of TBI recovery.

The QOLIBRI-OS assesses a similar construct to the QOLIBRI total score and can be used as a brief index of HRQoL for TBI.

No abstract

The Quality of Life after Brain Injury (QOLIBRI) instruments are traumatic brain injury-specific assessments of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), with established validity and reliability. The purpose of the study is to help improve the interpretability of the two QOLIBRI summary scores (the QOLIBRI Total score and the QOLBRI Overall Scale score). An analysis was conducted of 761 patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) that took part in the QOLIBRI validation studies. A cross-walk between QOLIBRI scores and the SF-36 Mental Component Summary norm-based scoring system was performed using geometric mean regression analysis. The exercise supports a previous suggestion that QOLIBRI Total scores < 60 indicate low or impaired HRQoL, and indicate that the corresponding score on the QOLIBRI-OS is <52. The percentage of cases in the sample that fell into the 'impaired HRQoL' category were 36% for the Mental Component Summary, 38% for the QOLIBRI Total, and 39% for the QOLIBRI-OS. Relationships between the QOLIBRI scales and the Glasgow Outcome Scale -Extended (GOSE), as a measure of global function, are presented in the form of means and standard deviations that allow comparison with other studies, and data on age and gender are presented for the QOLIBRI-OS. While bearing in mind the potential imprecision of the comparison, the findings provide a framework for evaluating QOLIBRI summary scores in relation to generic HRQoL that improves their interpretability.

Psychosocial, emotional, and physical problems can emerge after traumatic brain injury (TBI), potentially impacting health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Until now, however, neither the discriminatory power of disease-specific (QOLIBRI) and generic (SF-36) HRQoL nor their correlates have been compared in detail. These aspects as well as some psychometric item characteristics were studied in a sample of 795 TBI survivors. The Shannon H ' index absolute informativity, as an indicator of an instrument's power to differentiate between individuals within a specific group or health state, was investigated. Psychometric performance of the two instruments was predominantly good, generally higher, and more homogenous for the QOLIBRI than for the SF-36 subscales. Notably, the SF-36 “Role Physical,” “Role Emotional,” and “Social Functioning” subscales showed less satisfactory discriminatory power than all other dimensions or the sum scores of both instruments. The absolute informativity of disease-specific as well as generic HRQoL instruments concerning the different groups defined by different correlates differed significantly. When the focus is on how a certain subscale or sum score differentiates between individuals in one specific dimension/health state, the QOLIBRI can be recommended as the preferable instrument.