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.
Yarlas
Aaron S
AS
QualityMetric, Inc., 24 Albion Rd, Building 400, Lincoln, RI 02865, USA. ayarlas@qualitymetric.com
White
Michelle K
MK
Yang
Min
M
Saris-Baglama
Renee N
RN
Bech
Peter Galthen
PG
Christensen
Torsten
T
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