Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life in Older Adults with Chronic Illness

描述（由申请人提供）：准确的健康相关生活质量（HRQOL）测量是评估健康和卫生保健干预成功的关键方面。然而，心理学研究表明，基于记忆的方法，典型的HRQOL评估，往往受到外来因素的影响，如评估时的情绪状态和容易想到的信息。本应用程序的目的是评估现有的基于回忆的HRQOL测量方法，对比两种测量HRQOL的新工具，这两种工具被设计为对记忆偏差具有鲁棒性。具体来说，我们建议研究生态瞬间评估（EMA），它利用实时测量，因此不受记忆偏差的影响，以及一种新的基于日记的测量生活质量的方法，即日重建法（DRM）。DRM被设计成类似于EMA，因为它对内存偏差的鲁棒性，但负担和成本要少得多。我们打算开始在下肢骨关节炎患者（LE-OA）和健康老年人对照组中测试这些措施的有效性和有效性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Accurate health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measurement is a critical aspect of assessing health, and the success of health care interventions. However, psychological research indicates that memory-based methods, typical of HRQOL assessment, are often biased by extraneous factors, like mood state at the time of assessment and by information that comes easily to mind. The purpose of this application is to evaluate existing recall-based approaches to HRQOL measurement against two new tools for measuring HRQOL that have been designed to be robust to memory biases. Specifically, we propose to examine Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), which utilize real time measures and therefore are not subject to memory biases, and a new diary-based approach to measuring quality of life, the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). The DRM is designed to be similar to EMA in terms of being robust to memory biases, but is much less burdensome and expensive. We intend to begin to test the usefulness and validity of these measures among lower extremity osteoarthritis patients (LE-OA) and in a comparison group of healthy older adults. Our aims are to 1) determine the feasibility of administering EMA and DRM measures in an older OA population, 2) evaluate the validity of EMA and DRM for use as HRQOL measures, and 3) determine whether a DRM-based HRQOL measure reduces memory bias. To achieve these aims, we propose a longitudinal observational study of two groups of older adults, a group with LE-OA and a healthy comparison group. All participants will wear Actiwatches, which are wrist watch accelerometers that can also prompt participants to respond to a short questionnaire several times throughout the day. They will wear these for one week, at the end of which we will we will administer traditional recall-based measures that ask about symptoms and function for this same period of time. We will repeat this procedure twelve months later. These new methods could prove to be extremely valuable for health care researchers. The DRM is a cutting edge methodology that is much less costly and burdensome than EMA methods but to our knowledge, it has not been tested as a method for measuring HRQOL measure in patients.