Short health scale: A valid, reliable, and responsive instrument for subjective health assessment in Crohnʼs disease

Abstract

SHS is a valid, reliable and responsive HRQoL instrument also in patients with CD. It is easily completed by the patient and requires no further calculation by the investigator. SHS gives a comprehensive overview of the main aspects of the patient's subjective health perception and is a useful tool in both clinical practice and clinical studies.

Worries and concerns in a large unselected cohort of patients with Crohn's disease

“…However, the difference in median score was merely 5 points (25 vs. 30).The responsiveness ratio has been suggested as an alternative measure of responsiveness [25,26], but has to our knowledge not been published for the RFIPC. A ratio of 0.84 is lower than what we previously found for IBDQ (1.43) and SHS (1.06-1.98) in CD patients [18,20], but compares fairly well with the results for IBDQ (0.49-1.02) in other evaluations [31][32][33]. The lower responsiveness for RFIPC may be explained by a weaker relationship between worries and disease activity, compared with symptoms or functional impairment and disease activity.…”

“…The lower responsiveness for RFIPC may be explained by a weaker relationship between worries and disease activity, compared with symptoms or functional impairment and disease activity. For instance, the SHS item worries and the IBDQ dimension emotional function had the lowest responsiveness ratios when PGA disease activity was used as a measure of change in health status [18,20]. The RFIPC may therefore be less useful as an endpoint in clinical trials of interventions against disease activity.…”

“…The results are presented as individual scores for each of the four items. The SHS has been validated in patients with CD [20]. The SHS was only used in two centers (Jönköping and Örebro).…”

Touch screens as a tool in patient care in the IBD outpatient clinic

“…The former study of touch screens in rheumatology used the same approach, whereas Hjortwang et al and Stjernman et al validated the SHS score by retesting after two and four weeks, respectively. [11,12] However, the usefulness of the latter approach in patients with IBD is questionable, as symptoms may change over weeks, which would result in true changes in scores and not reflect differences in use of touch screens and paper questionnaires.…”

“…[11,12] However, it is well known that correlation is not an appropriate measure of agreement between measurement methods. [13] We therefore used the Bland-Altman plots to illustrate the agreement between the two methods (touch screen and paper questionnaire).…”