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21HUA THE NATIONAL HEALTH MEASUREMENT STUDY: A PUBLIC DATA SET FOR HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY-OF-LIFE RESEARCH

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Columbus A-C (Hyatt Regency Penns Landing)
Dennis G. Fryback, PhD1, Nancy Cross Dunham, PhD1, Mari Palta, PhD1, Janel Hanmer, PhD1, Dasha Cherepanov, BS1, Ron D. Hays, PhD2, Robert M. Kaplan, PhD2, Theodore G. Ganiats, MD3, David Feeny, PhD4 and Paul Kind, MPhil5, (1)University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, (2)University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, (3)University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, (4)Health Utilities, Inc., Dundas, ONT, and Kaiser Permanente Northwest Center for Health Research, Portland, OR, (5)Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York, United Kingdom
   PURPOSE: To alert researchers to a new data source for secondary analysis, we describe in detail a publicly available population survey of older US adults containing multiple health-related quality-of-life (HRQOL) indexes.  

   METHODS:  In 2005-06, US adults aged 35-89 were contacted by the National Health Measurement Study (NHMS) staff using random digit dialed telephone survey methods; computer-assisted interviewers administered the EuroQol EQ-5D, Health Utilities Index, SF-36v2TM, and QWB-SA questionnaires in random order to every respondent.  Demographic, socioeconomic, and additional health data were elicited.  People aged 65+ and telephone exchanges with high proportions of African American households were over-sampled.  The data are de-identified, and will be publicly available with extensive documentation in July, 2008, through the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACDA, and at BADGIR, http://nesstar.ssc.wisc.edu, a University of Wisconsin interdisciplinary data archive.

   RESULTS: The NHMS collected data on 3844 adults in the continental US (1641 males and 2203 females; 1086 African Americans).  Survey weights are supplied to allow national reference estimates for adults ages 35-89.  HRQOL indexes in the data are EQ-5D, HALex, HUI2, HUI3, SF-6D (from both SF-36 and SF-12 questions), QWB-SA, and the 4-item Centers for Disease Control and Prevention HRQOL-4 (“Healthy Days”) instrument, as well as all the SF-36v2TM scales and summary scores.  Individual items subsuming each HRQOL index are available except HUI2 and HUI3, for which only domain levels are archived.  Respondents are characterized by census region of residence, age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, education, household income and assets, health insurance, weight, height, smoking status, psychological well-being scales, and everyday and lifetime discrimination items. Respondents indicated whether they had been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, eye disease, sleep disorder, chronic respiratory disease, clinical depression or anxiety disorder, gastrointestinal ulcer, thyroid disorder, and/or severe chronic back pain.  Census tract is not identified however race composition, education levels, economic factors, and urbanicity of each respondent’s census tract of residence are included as contextual variables.  

   CONCLUSION:  The NHMS is a rich public data source about older US adults for researchers interested in population-based HRQOL questions and multiple instruments.

See more of: Poster Session III

See more of: 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 19-22, 2008)