OBJECTIVES: To investigate the extent of agreement of HUI3 and SF-6D measures by concurrent use of these instruments within a pooled harmonized dataset from two prospective longitudinal birth cohort studies conducted in Germany and Australia that followed-up individuals born very preterm or very low birth weight (VP/VLBW), and term-born or normal birthweight controls from birth into adulthood.

METHODS: Individual participant data (IPD) were obtained from two prospective cohorts of individuals born VP/VLBW and controls contributing to the `Research on European Children and Adults Born Preterm (RECAP)' consortium. The combined dataset included over 407 adult VP/VLBW survivors and 367 term-born or normal birthweight controls, ranging in age from 22 to 23 years. Bland-Altman plots and intra-class correlation coefficients were used to examine the agreement between the measures. Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models in a one-step approach using fixed and random effects estimators.

RESULTS: Results show significant discordance between the HUI3 and SF-6D multi-attribute utility measures in the VP/VLBW sample, term-born or normal birthweight controls and the combined samples. Agreement between the HUI3 and SF-6D multi-attribute utility measures was weaker in term-born or normal birthweight controls compared to VP/VLBW individuals. Results show that unlike SF-6D, HUI3 instrument was able to identify statistically significant association of between VP/VLBW and term-born or normal birthweight controls related to physical or cognitive aspects of health.

CONCLUSIONS: The HUI3 and SF-6D each provide unique information on different aspects of health status across groups considered. Studies focused on measuring physical or cognitive aspects of health will likely benefit from utilising HUI3 instead of SF-6D in order to better detect and quantify the effects of studies that assess health status VP/VLBW or general population controls.