A new tool to measure the burden of Crohn's disease and its treatment: Do patient and physician perceptions match?

✍ Scribed by Allison R. Wilcox; Maria Concepcion C. Dragnev; Christopher J. Darcey; Corey A. Siegel

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 211 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1078-0998
• DOI: 10.1002/ibd.21094

✦ Synopsis

Background:

Health-related quality of life (hrqol) is difficult to efficiently measure in the clinic setting. our aim was to develop and test a simple tool to measure the burden of crohn's disease (cd) and its treatment and to compare how patients and their physicians perceive the impact of cd on hrqol.

Methods:

A cross-sectional, self-administered questionnaire was distributed to patients with cd. the questionnaire included a feeling thermometer to measure disease and treatment burden, which was compared to the short inflammatory bowel disease questionnaire (sibdq). at that visit, the patient's physician completed a questionnaire containing the feeling thermometer and the harvey bradshaw index (hbi). nonparametric tests were use to report results.

Results:

In all, 113 surveys were completed. the median age of respondents was 40 years and 68% were female. using the feeling thermometer (scale 0-100), patients reported their current health as a median of 70 (interquartile range [iqr] 50-80) and their disease specific burden as 20 (iqr 10-40). treatment-specific burden was 6.9 (iqr 1.3-20). physicians perceived their patients' current health as a median of 71.3 (iqr 57.5-90) with a disease burden of 12.5 (iqr 5-30). spearman's rho between the burden of symptoms measured by the feeling thermometer and the sibdq was -0.71. the correlation between patient and physician perception of current health was 0.73.

Conclusions:

Two questions using the feeling thermometer provide a quick and accurate assessment of the burden of cd on patients. physicians' perception of the burden of disease was similar to their patients.