Sheffield, UK - The Child Health Utility 9D (CHU9D) is a generic preference-based measure of health related quality of life originally developed with children age 7-11 years. Recently, there has been interest in its potential application with adolescents, with some evidence already published that it performs well. Research carried out in Adelaide, Australia, gives further support to the use of the Child Health Utility 9D (CHU9D) measure with adolescents. This research assesses its performance in conjunction with another paediatric measure, the KIDSCREEN-10. This study, “
Measuring and valuing health benefits for economic evaluation in adolescence: an assessment of the practicality and validity of the Child Health Utility 9D in the Australian adolescent population,” was co-authored by Katherine Stevens from the University of Sheffield and Julie Ratcliffe from Flinders University.
A web-based survey was administered to 961 adolescents. The survey included the CHU9D and another well-validated paediatric measure, the KIDSCREEN-10. The performance of the CHU9D was assessed and the measures were compared in terms of their coverage of items pertinent to adolescents’ quality of life, correlations between dimensions of quality of life, and overall scores.
The CHU9D demonstrated good ease of use and validity with adolescents, discriminating well between those with and without medical conditions. The strongest degree of correlation was found with the only item in common between the measures (sad).
Says Dr. Stevens, “This research provides further evidence for the practicality and validity of the CHU9D in the economic evaluation of adolescent health care and public health programmes.”
The results of this study are published in
Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR).
Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research as well as policy papers to help health care leaders make evidence-based decisions. The journal is published bi-monthly and has over 8,000 subscribers (clinicians, decision makers, and researchers worldwide).
International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) is a nonprofit, international, educational and scientific organization that strives to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness of health care resource use to improve health.
For more information: www.ispor.org