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Abstract
Background Health related quality of life (HRQOL) of Giant cell Arthritis (GCA) patients is improtant because it adds depth to our understanding of how a disease and its treatments affect them. Though only one previous study has addressed the short term impact of GCA on HRQOL, the long term impact has not fully been investigated.
Objectives The aim of our study is to assess the long term HRQOL outcomes of GCA patients using the Japanese version of EuroQol 5 Dimention (EQ-5D).
Methods 40 GCA patients who admitted to our hospital from November 2004 to June 2014 were enrolled. All patients were received prednisolone over 2 years. Patients who had lost their eyesight were excluded because vision concern for HRQOL nor it is difficult to mesure by using EQ-5D. This is a retrospective study and deta were collected by telephone interview. Patients evluated their health status using five dimensions. The EQ-5D score were calculated based on the Japanese version of the value set. Primary outcome is the mortality rate and the norm of EQ-5D score. As a secondary analysis, we classified the patients as follows and compare the mortality rate and EQ-5D score between two groups.
Group 1: GCA patients who received prednisolone over 5 years.
Group 2: GCA patients who received prdnisolone less than 5 years.
Results There were 16 male (40%) and 24 female (60%). The median age was 83.5 (95% CI 79.24–87.76). The mortality rate was 37.5% (15 patients). Kaplan-Meier curve is shown in Figure1. The median EQ-5D score was 0.746 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.852–0.640) and it is lower than Japanese norm (0.853 in male and 0.808 in female). In the secondary analysis, the mortality rate was 56.0% (14 patients) in Group1 and 6.6% (1 patient) in Group2. It was significantly higher in Group 1 (P<0.05). The median EQ-5D score was 0.764 (95% CI 0.579–0.870) in Group1 versus 0.768 (95% CI 0.621–0.915) in Group2. There was no statistically significant difference between them (P=0.813).
Conclusions This study focused on GCA patients with prednisolone therapy over 2 years. It showed that EQ-5D was decreased compared with the Japanese norm but it didn't clearly decrease after 2 years of treatment. These findings suggest the value of measuring health status in GCA patients by EQ-5D at least first 2 years of treatment, because it would allow comprehensive evaluation of the patient's health condition and add another dimension to the subjective symptoms and laboratory data.
References
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References
Disclosure of Interest None declared