Measuring the health status burden in hemodialysis patients using the SF-36® health survey.
OBJECTIVE
The SF-36, a generic measure of 8 domains of health-related quality of life (HRQOL), has been widely used to examine HRQOL of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD). The current study synthesizes existing literature to examine which SF-36 domains capture the largest burden in this patient population.


METHODS
A literature search of published studies that presented descriptive statistics for baseline SF-36 scale scores from HD patients was conducted. Disease burden was estimated by comparing HD patients' SF-36 scores to those from either a control group or a general population normative sample taken from the same country. For each study, Cohen d effect sizes for between-sample differences were calculated for each scale.


RESULTS
Twenty-six articles that matched set criteria were identified. Estimation of differences between HD patients and comparison groups showed that the SF-36 physical functioning scale yielded the largest weighted mean effect size across studies (d = 1.46), followed by the general health (d = 1.29) and role physical (d = 1.21) scales.


CONCLUSIONS
Among the eight domains of the SF-36, physical functioning, general health, and role physical scales best captured disease burden for HD patients. The disease burden negatively impacts physical HRQOL more strongly than mental HRQOL.
QualityMetric, Inc., 24 Albion Rd, Building 400, Lincoln, RI 02865, USA. ayarlas@qualitymetric.com
Aaron S
AS
Yarlas
Michelle K
MK
White
Min
M
Yang
Renee N
RN
Saris-Baglama
Peter Galthen
PG
Bech
Torsten
T
Christensen
D017281:Cost of Illness; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007676:Kidney Failure, Chronic / Q000503:physiopathology; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D011788:Quality of Life; D006435:Renal Dialysis; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires