Search

The article discusses a study that examines the validity, sensitivity, and relative efficiency of 15D and SF-6D questionnaires in Spanish patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) to be used in cost-effectiveness analyses. Patients were recruited from different local PD associations. Non-parametric statistics were used for all analyses since data did not follow a normal distribution. Floor and ceiling effects are relevant to examine and compare the improvements of any treatment.

Introduction: generic, preference-based Health- Related Quality of Life instruments are receiving growing attention in health-care decision-making process. In spite of this, to our knowledge, EQ-5D and SF-6D have never been compared in a Parkinson´s disease population sample.Objective: the aim of this paper was to assess the psychometric properties of both instruments in a Spanish PD population sample.Methods: a total sample of 133 patients were interviewed using EQ-5D-3L and SF-6D. The validity, level of agreement and sensitivity of both instruments were computed and then compared. The Spanish tariff has been used in both instruments.Results: utilities of EQ-5D-3L and SF-6D have shown a strong correlation (r >0.50 and p<0.001) with the summary score of the PDQ-8 and the EQ-VAS score. Significant differences were observed in the stages III-IV of the Hoehn & Yahr stage. SF-6D had 51% higher efficiency than EQ-5D at detecting differences in symptoms severity.Discussion: both EQ-5D-3L and SF-6D seem to be adequate generic Health-Related Quality of Life measures in terms of validity and sensitivity.Conclusion: EQ-5D-3L presents greater ceiling and floor effects than the SF-6D instrument in this sample. Besides, the instrument SF-6D was better at detecting changes in symptoms severity compared with EQ-5D-3L. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]