Disease-Related Predictors of Health-Related Quality of Life in Youth With Eosinophilic Esophagitis

Abstract

The clinical symptoms of EoE, specifically epigastric pain, were found to be predictive of the youth's HRQoL. Targeted interventions to help youth with EoE better manage their specific symptom experiences could ultimately improve HRQoL.

Systematic review: health‐related quality of life in children and adults with eosinophilic oesophagitis—instruments for measurement and determinant factors

“…Some of the most noticeable findings of our systematic review of the literature, differences in HRQoL levels were found when measured with generic or disease‐specific instruments, and when children and adult populations were considered. Thus, the generic PedsQL form concurrently demonstrated a significantly impaired HRQoL in children and adolescents, with a trend by parents‐proxy responses to underestimate the deleterious effects of the disease on their children's HRQoL . Family perceptions on QoL impaired with dietary restrictions, but the control of symptoms increased the scores provided by children.…”

“…Thus, children and adolescents with EoE (and other eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders) missed significantly more school days in the past month (mean 4.9 vs 0.5) and year (23.2 vs 2.8) than healthy controls, and were more likely to have received mental health services (47,2% vs 14.6%) and medication for mental needs than controls (24.2% vs 7.3%) . In addition, children with EoE sleep less hours (up to 22.2%) and have a poorer quality of sleep, so they are awake more frequently than healthy controls, with a trend towards sleep disturbance and poorer QoL …”

“…Regarding the aims of the retrieved studies, the references retrieved included five papers on specific questionnaire developments, 1 abstract on item refinement and 1 trans‐cultural adaptation and validation of a questionnaire . In addition, 14 studies assessed HRQoL by generic instruments, while 11 documents employed disease‐specific scales . A further study which used a nonstructured telephone‐based assessment to evaluate HRQoL was not included in our systematic review.…”

“…Five studies, overall including 154 children and adolescents with EoE, used the generic PedsQL inventory (parent and child report forms), to capture HRQoL perception. The PedQL is a brief (23 items), practical (less than 4 minutes to complete), flexible (designed for use with children in the community, school and clinic) and appropriate for ages between 2 and 18 year old questionnaire, developed by Varni et al…”

“…Of the remaining 58 documents retrieved for complete evaluation, 24 were excluded for the following reasons: duplicated abstracts or abstracts previous to full papers (12), lack of information regarding QoL (6) or QoL not structurally assessed (4), subsets of patients included in later papers (1) and no information related with EoE (1). In the end, 34 studies (comprising of 16 full papers 11,12,18,19,21,22,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] and 18 abstracts [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] (one of them later published in full 50 ) were included in our systematic review ( Figure 1).…”