Health–related quality of life (HRQOL) and migraine

Abstract

Although the genuine interest in measuring qualitative aspects of life has increased in the medical field together with our capability to transform patients’ subjective reports, opinions and ratings in standardized pieces of information, the debate about the true objective to measure, the focus and the terminology is still lively. Many instruments, both generic and disease–tailored, have been developed, tested and used in headache and migraine patients. Advances in the field of health outcome assessment have made available a new generation of approaches and measures, both specific and generic, that are based on an approach called dynamic assessment. According to the developers, it is now possible to produce valid and reliable estimates of a person’s perception of health by asking only those questions relevant to the individual respondent’s state. Despite the large body of evidence about the intrinsic value of such new methodology, its “incremental” value when applied in research projects or in the context of programs of disease or outcome management is yet not clear. Thus, before these new methods are experimentally compared with more traditional approaches, in the general population and in headache and migraine patients, caution should be recommended and their use should be avoided outside formal research projects.