Measuring health status and decline in at-risk seniors residing in the community using the Health Utilities Index Mark 2

Abstract

The HUI2 measure of HRQL in older persons at risk for institutionalization appears to reflect health status at a point in time and to be responsive to changes in health status over time.

Determinants of health-related quality of life in older primary care patients: results of the longitudinal observational AgeCoDe Study

“…Therefore, vision impairment might not be significantly associated with HRQoL if controlled for the effect of physical activity. 22 Increasing age significantly influenced HRQoL in this study; the same finding has been reached in other studies, 11,12 although there are also those that did not find an age influence. 9,23 This could be partly explained by the older age of our cohort, as well as the cohort of Zhang and colleagues, 11 when compared with the cohort of Davis and colleagues 9 (mean age at baseline 69.6 (+/-3.0)).…”

“…The researchers have assumed that increasing functional impairment (caused by comorbidity) affects HRQoL more than increasing comorbidity itself; this corresponds with the interpretations of Blane and colleagues 24 and could also explain why comorbidity has been found to be a significant predictor for HRQoL in other longitudinal studies -for example, those by Byles and colleagues 7 and Zhang and colleagues 11 -especially when the study used a functional comorbidity index. 5,9 Although significant crosssectional associations were detected in this study, objective memory decline, incident subjective memory impairment, and declining cognitive activity were not found to significantly influence the course of HRQoL longitudinally, with the exception of subjective memory impairment in patients with a medium level of education.…”

“…4 Longitudinal studies are needed to investigate factors influencing HRQoL. Available longitudinal studies are based only on small numbers, [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] have short follow-up periods of 6-18 months, 5,6,8,9,11,12 and/or did not investigate the development of factors influencing HRQoL, but included the factors only at one fixed point in time. 13,14 As a result, there are insufficient data to derive practical considerations for GPs on which changes in influencing factors might support patients in maintaining or improving their HRQoL.…”

Depression and Quality of Life in Older Persons: A Review

“…Depression in older persons (≥60 years) is prevalent in community living settings [2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and even more prevalent among older individuals who have been hospitalized due to serious physical diseases or institutionalized due to reduced physical and/or cognitive functioning [9,10,11,12]. Known risk factors for depression are female gender [1,13], older age [14,15], poorer coping abilities [16], physical morbidity [2,4,9,17,18,19,20,21,22], impaired level of functioning [2,5,6,9,13,18,23,24,25,26,27,28,29], reduced cognition [2,3,8,20,30,31,32,33,34,35], and bereavement [13,36]. Depression has been associated with an increased risk of mortality [2,37], and poorer outcome of treatment of physical disorders [4,10].…”

“…The wide range of definitions of QOL complicates the research field and may make comparisons between studies difficult. Furthermore, the wide variety of assessment instruments for both depression/depressive symptoms and QOL [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,18,20,21,25,26,34,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51] increases the need for a review of the existing research. Given these challenges, the aim of the present study was to review the literature on the association between depression and QOL in older persons.…”