Whose (quality of) life is it anyway? Measurement issues of health-related quality of life in critically ill older adults.

摘要

Further complicating the measurement of HRQoL in older and critically ill patients is the notion of "response shift," that an individual's perception of quality of life is not fixed, but rather is adaptive to changes in expectation about treatment and health status. In longitudinal studies of HRQoL, a potential methodo-logic solution to response shift is to incorporate the "then test." In this case, persons are asked at the time of follow-up to rerate their baseline HRQoL so that the same reference point is used for each measure and can be compared with that rated at baseline to determine whether any perceptual change in HRQoL has occurred within the individual (14). Critical care researchers are encouraged to incorporate "this technique in future studies because the response to critical illness is highly variable.