Development of an Item Bank for a Health-Related Quality of Life Measure in Spondyloarthritis

Abstract

Objective: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is an important aspect in the management of chronic diseases such as spondyloarthritis (SpA). A promising approach to reduce respondent burden when measuring HRQOL is the use of shorter patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) delivered using computerized adaptive tests (CATs). However, the lack of an item bank that covers the entire continuum of the HRQOL domain impedes the development of CATs to measure HRQOL among patients with SpA. We aimed to develop an item bank for an HRQOL measure among patients with SpA based on the items from existing validated PROMs.

Methods: This study is guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) and Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) standards. Relevant articles were retrieved from PubMed, Embase, and PsycINFO (Ovid) databases. Items from existing PROMs were binned and winnowed according to the facets of HRQOL in the World Health Organization (WHO) quality of life framework.

Results: We identified 147 relevant articles, from which written permission was obtained for including 31 PROMs into the item bank. PROMs contained 1039 items, which underwent binning and winnowing. This resulted in 968 items covering 23 domains of HRQOL in the WHO framework, with the number of items within each domain ranging from 1 to 453.

Conclusion: We created an item bank to measure HRQOL among patients with SpA using items from validated PROMs. This set can provide the foundation for the development of CATs to measure HRQOL among patients with SpA.

Keywords: health-related quality of life; patient-reported outcome measures; spondyloarthropathies; systematic review.