How to Assess an Article that Deals with Health-Related Quality of Life

The outcome, health-related quality of life (HRQL), is a subcategory of quality of life that includes domains of physical, mental, emotional, and social functioning. This outcome, measured with sophisticated instruments, is becoming increasingly popular in surgical studies to report postoperative results. This is understandable as surgical outcomes in surgery often relate to improvement in patients’ health than mortality. HRQL studies help surgeons decide if they would like to adopt or reject novel surgical interventions/innovations. Because of this, it is important that surgeons know how to properly appraise an article that uses an HRQL measure or patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) to compare surgical interventions. Through a clinical scenario, this chapter explains the critical appraisal of a surgical study that uses HRQL (or PROM) as an outcome. For surgeon-investigators, this chapter will explain which HRQL scales to use, when to use them, and how to report them.