EuroQol EQ-5D

The EuroQol Five Dimension (EQ-5D) is a widely used generic measurement tool for assessing quality of life in clinical trials and other prospective studies. The EQ-5D questionnaire consists of five questions that cover different domains of quality of life: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort, and anxiety/depression. Each domain has three levels of response (no problems, some problems, or severe problems), and a more recent version, the EQ-5D-5L, includes five levels of response, providing more granularity.

Key features of the EQ-5D include:

– Ease of Use: The EQ-5D is quick and easy to administer.

– Extensive Validation: It has been extensively researched and validated.

– Multilingual: It is available in many different languages.

– Generic Applicability: As it is not disease-specific, it is applicable to most disease areas, allowing comparisons of interventions across different conditions. However, it may be less applicable in mental health and diseases causing specific disabilities, such as blindness.

The importance of EQ-5D lies in its ability to generate utility scores for each possible response combination, based on population surveys. These utility scores can be combined with the duration of each health state to calculate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) for each study subject. QALYs are crucial for conducting cost-utility analyses of healthcare interventions.

It is generally recommended that the EQ-5D be administered alongside a disease-specific quality of life instrument in clinical trials. This combination allows for a comprehensive assessment, capturing both the generic quality of life and condition-specific impacts of therapy. According to NICE guidelines, the EQ-5D is the preferred measure of health-related quality of life (HRQL) in adults. If EQ-5D data are unavailable or inappropriate for certain conditions or treatments, alternative valuation methods should be clearly described and comparable to those used for the EQ-5D.

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