title: The relationship between health-state utilities and the SF-12 in a general population.
abstract: It would be a major advance if quality-of-life instruments could be translated into health-state utilities. The aim with this study was to investigate the relationship between the SF-12 and health-state utilities, based on responses to a postal questionnaire sent to a random sample of 8,000 inhabitants, aged 20-84 years, in the general population. The questionnaire included the SF-12, a rating-scale (RS) question, and a time-tradeoff (TTO) question; the response rate was 68%. Age, gender, and the 12 items of the SF-12 were used as explanatory variables in a linear regression analysis of the health-state utilities. The regression models explained about 50% of the variance in the RS answers and about 25% of the variance in the TTO answers. Most of the SF-12 items were related to the health-state utilities in the expected ways, with especially strong results for the RS method. The results suggest that the SF-12 can be converted to health-state utilities, but that further work is needed to reliably estimate the conversion function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmacy, Uppsala University, Sweden. Lena.Lundberg@samfarm.uu.se
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lundberg
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Johannesson
authors.forename: D G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Isacson
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Borgquist
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008603:Mental Health; D008875:Middle Aged; D019057:Quality-Adjusted Life Years; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012380:Role; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D013548:Sweden; D013997:Time Factors