Response to comments on Mulhern et al., 'improving the measurement of QALYs in dementia: Developing patient- and carer-reported health state classification systems using rasch analysis'

摘要

We thank Arons et al. [1] for their comments regarding our article using traditional psychometric and Rasch analysis to develop dementia-specific health-state classification systems (DEMQOL-U and DEMQOL-Proxy-U) [2] that have subsequently been valued to generate utility scales for use in the generation of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) [3]. We take this opportunity to respond to their reservations regarding the content validity of DEMQOL-U, and the analytical techniques we used to develop the classification systems.